The effects of phonetic context on speech-sound discrimination

This study was designed to examine the influence of contextual elements on speech-sound discrimination performance. The test employed was comprised of ten stimulus words located within three sentence structures providing initial, medial, and final placement of stimuli within sentences. All sentence items were presented in two forms, naturally articulated and mechanically assembled, to 25 normal preschool children. Disruption of the suprasegmental feature of the assembled test was achieved by splicing isolated words into sentences previously recorded with silence in the stimulus word position. Statistical analysis indicated that error scores on the assembled sentence items were significantly greater. Disruption of suprasegmental features appeared to significantly influence the discrimination of target sounds within stimulus words when the words were in the medial and final positions of the sentences.