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Constituent syllable effects in a nonsense-word repetition task
C Dollaghan1, M Biber, T Campbell
1University of Pittsburgh, PA.
Journal of Speech and Hearing Research
|October 1, 1993
Summary
Children with language impairments may struggle with phonological processing. This study found that the lexical status of stressed syllables in nonsense words affects repetition accuracy, suggesting a need for better stimulus control in research.
Area of Science:
- Child language development
- Speech-language pathology
- Psycholinguistics
Background:
- Multisyllabic nonsense-word repetition tasks assess phonological processing in children with language impairments.
- Previous research suggests these nonsense words may not be entirely "nonsensical."
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the impact of stressed syllable lexical status on nonsense-word repetition performance.
- To determine if the presence of real word components within nonsense words affects accuracy.
Main Methods:
- Participants: Normally achieving school-age boys.
- Stimuli: Multisyllabic nonsense words with either lexical (word) or nonlexical (nonword) stressed syllables.
- Task: Repetition of nonsense words.
Main Results:
- Boys repeated nonsense words with lexical stressed syllables significantly more accurately than those with nonlexical stressed syllables.
- This indicates that the lexical status of syllables influences repetition performance.
Conclusions:
- The lexical status of syllables is a critical factor to control in nonsense-word stimuli construction.
- Future research using these tasks should carefully consider the phonological and lexical properties of nonsense words.