Consonant-free words: evidence from Hebrew speaking children with cochlear implants

This paper reports on a rare phenomenon in language development-the production of words without consonants, and thus syllables without an onset. Such words, which are referred as Consonant-free words (CFWs), appeared for a short period in the early speech of hearing impaired Hebrew-speaking children, who produced words consisting of one or two vowels (where the latter were disyllabic). The quantitative data are drawn from the speech of six monolingual hearing-impaired Hebrew-speaking children using a cochlear implant device. Their age ranged from 1;5-2;8 years at their first recording session. The elicitation procedure was based on spontaneous speech and picture naming. Findings indicate that cochlear implant users produce CFWs at the initial stage of the prosodic word development. This study claims the CFWs characterize a transitional period between babbling and speech, which varies between different types of populations. The transitional period is rather short in typically developing children, who hardly ever produce CFWs, greater in cochlear implant children, and the greatest in developmental speech disorders such as dyspraxia. Clinical implications of these findings are also discussed.