Quantifying phonological knowledge in children with phonological disorder

Area of Science:

• Speech-language pathology
• Linguistics
• Developmental psychology

Background:

• Generative phonology utilizes contrastive minimal pairs to identify functional phonological units.
• This method is adapted for clinical use to establish phonemic inventories in children with phonological disorder.
• Phonemic inventories offer qualitative insights into a child's phonological system for assessment and treatment.

Purpose of the Study:

• To confirm the link between phonemic inventory and consonant accuracy in children with phonological disorder.
• To identify percentage accuracy cutoffs for classifying sounds within a child's phonemic inventory.
• To evaluate the effectiveness of speech-sound probes in determining phonemic function.

Main Methods:

• Analysis of single-word productions from 275 preschool-age children with phonological disorder.
• Utilizing data from the Learnability Project (Gierut, 2015b).
• Examining the relationship between phonemic inventory (phonological knowledge) and consonant accuracy (production vs. target form).

Main Results:

• A strong correlation was confirmed between phonemic inventory and consonant accuracy.
• Potential percentage accuracy cutoffs were identified for reliable sound classification.
• Phonemic function of up to 90% of English consonants was identifiable via accuracy scores.

Conclusions:

• Consonant accuracy is a reliable indicator of phonemic inventory in children with phonological disorder.
• Accurate classification of phonemic inventory is achievable with sufficiently large speech samples.
• These findings support the use of accuracy measures for clinical assessment and treatment planning.