Nexus to Lexis: Phonological Disorders in Children.

Research on phonological disorders in children has conventionally emphasized the speech sound in search of causes, diagnoses, treatments, and prevention of the disorder. This article aims to shift the research focus to the word instead. The motivation comes from advances in psycholinguistics that demonstrate the word is central to the perception, production, and acquisition of phonological information.

Effect Size for Single-Subject Design in Phonological Treatment.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to document, validate, and corroborate effect size (ES) for single-subject design in treatment of children with functional phonological disorders; to evaluate potential child-specific contributing variables relative to ES; and to establish benchmarks for interpretation of ES for the population.

Method: Data were extracted from the Developmental Phonologies Archive for 135 preschool children with phonological disorders who previously participated in single-subject experimental treatment studies. Standard mean difference(all with correction for continuity) was computed to gauge the magnitude of generalization gain that accrued longitudinally from treatment for each child with the data aggregated for purposes of statistical analyses.

Dense neighborhoods and mechanisms of learning: evidence from children with phonological delay.

There is a noted advantage of dense neighborhoods in language acquisition, but the learning mechanism that drives the effect is not well understood. Two hypotheses--long-term auditory word priming and phonological working memory--have been advanced in the literature as viable accounts. These were evaluated in two treatment studies enrolling twelve children with phonological delay.

How to meet the neighbors: Modality effects on phonological generalization.

Long-term auditory priming of words from dense neighborhoods has been posited as a learning mechanism that affects change in the phonological structure of children's lexical representations. An apparent confound associated with the modality of priming responsible for structural change has been introduced in the literature, which challenges this proposal. Thus, our purpose was to evaluate prime modality in the treatment of children with phonological delay.

Unraveling phonological conspiracies: A case study.

This paper focuses on three seemingly unrelated error patterns in the sound system of a child with a phonological delay, Child 218 (male, age 4 years 6 months) and ascribes those error patterns to a larger conspiracy to eliminate fricatives from the phonetic inventory. Employing Optimality Theory for its advantages in characterizing conspiracies, our analysis offers a unified account of the observed repairs. The contextual restrictions on those repairs are, moreover, attributed to early developmental prominence effects, which are independently manifested in another error pattern involving rhotic consonants.

The coronal fricative problem.

This paper examines a range of predicted versus attested error patterns involving coronal fricatives (e.g. [s, z, θ, ð]) as targets and repairs in the early sound systems of monolingual English-acquiring children.

Age of word acquisition effects in treatment of children with phonological delays.

The effects of the age of acquisition (AoA) of words were examined in the clinical treatment of 10 preschool children with phonological delays. Using a single-subject multiple-baseline experimental design, children were enrolled in one of four conditions that varied the AoA of the treated words (early vs. late acquired) relative to their corresponding word frequency (high vs.

On the anatomy of a chain shift.

Phonological chain shifts have been the focus of many theoretical, developmental, and clinical concerns. This paper considers an overlooked property of the problem by focusing on the typological properties of the widely attested 's > θ > f' chain shift involving the processes of Labialization and Dentalization in early phonological development. Findings are reported from a cross-sectional study of 234 children (ages 3 years; 0 months-7;9) with functional (nonorganic) phonological delays.

Density, frequency and the expressive phonology of children with phonological delay.

The effect of word-level variables on expressive phonology has not been widely studied, although the properties of words likely bear on the emergence of sound structure (Stoel-Gammon, 2011). Eight preschoolers, diagnosed with phonological delay, were assigned to treatment to experimentally induce gains in expressive phonology. Erred sounds were taught using stimulus words that varied orthogonally in neighborhood density and word frequency as the independent variables.

Effect size in clinical phonology.

The purpose of this article is to motivate the use of effect size (ES) for single-subject research in clinical phonology, with an eye towards meta-analyses of treatment effects for children with phonological disorders. Standard mean difference (SMD) is introduced and illustrated as one ES well suited to the multiple baseline (MBL) design and evaluation of generalization learning, both of which are key to experimental studies in clinical phonology.

On the interaction of velar fronting and labial harmony.

This article documents the typological occurrence and interactions of two seemingly independent error patterns, namely Velar Fronting and Labial Harmony, in a cross-sectional investigation of the sound systems of 235 children with phonological delays (ages 3;0 to 7;9). The results revealed that the occurrence of Labial Harmony depends on the occurrence of Velar Fronting, and that, when these processes co-occurred, all three predicted types of interactions were attested. A constrained version of Optimality Theory is put forward that offers a unified explanation for the implicational relationship between these error patterns and their observed interactions.

On the interaction of deaffrication and consonant harmony.

Error patterns in children's phonological development are often described as simplifying processes that can interact with one another with different consequences. Some interactions limit the applicability of an error pattern, and others extend it to more words. Theories predict that error patterns interact to their full potential.

Evidence-based practice: a matrix for predicting phonological generalization.

This paper describes a matrix for clinical use in the selection of phonological treatment targets to induce generalization, and in the identification of probe sounds to monitor during the course of intervention. The matrix appeals to a set of factors that have been shown to promote phonological generalization in the research literature, including the nature of error patterns, implicational universals, developmental norms, and stimulability. A case study of a child with a phonological disorder is presented to illustrate how the matrix may be utilized in evidence-based practice.

Phonological learning and lexicality of treated stimuli.

The purpose was to evaluate the lexicality of treated stimuli relative to phonological learning by preschool children with functional phonological disorders. Four children were paired in a single-subject alternating treatments design that was overlaid on a multiple baseline across subjects design. Within each pair, one child was taught one sound in real words and a second sound in non-words; for the other child of the pair, lexicality was reversed and counterbalanced.

The predictive power of optimality theory for phonological treatment.

The phonology and clinically induced learning patterns of a female child with a phonological delay (age 4;11) were examined from the analytical perspective of Optimality Theory. The analysis revealed that a Consonant Harmony error pattern affected alveolar stops from two different sources-from underlying lexical representations and from representations derived by an interacting error pattern of Deaffrication. The implications of that analysis for the selection of treatment targets were explored in a treatment study.

Nonwords and generalization in children with phonological disorders.

Purpose: To evaluate the effects of using nonword (NW) stimuli in treatment of children with phonological disorders relative to real words (RWs).

Methods: Production data from 60 children were examined retrospectively. Thirty of the participants were previously treated on sounds in error using NWs, and the other 30 had been treated using RWs.

Comparative Markedness and Induced Opacity.

Results are reported from a descriptive and experimental study that was intended to evaluate comparative markedness (McCarthy 2002, 2003) as an amendment to optimality theory. Two children (aged 4;3 and 4;11) with strikingly similar, delayed phonologies presented with two independent, interacting error patterns of special interest, i.e.

Comparability of lexical corpora: word frequency in phonological generalization.

Statistical regularities in language have been examined for new insight to the language acquisition process. This line of study has aided theory advancement, but it also has raised methodological concerns about the applicability of corpora data to child populations. One issue is whether it is appropriate to extend the regularities observed in the speech of adults to developing linguistic systems.

Phonological complexity and language learnability.

Purpose: To extend formal models of language learnability to applications in clinical treatment of children with functional phonological delays.

Method: The focus of the narrative review is on phonological complexity. This follows from learnability theory, whereby complexity in the linguistic input to children has been shown to trigger language learning.

Experimental validation of OT solutions to the comprehension-production dilemma.

The relationship between perception and production remains an unresolved issue within the study of phonological acquisition. Recent developments in optimality theory offer potentially new solutions to this long-standing problem; but thus far, the proposals that have been advanced are in the absence of actual perception-production data from a given child. This paper provides an empirical instantiation of the perception-production effects by appealing to data from children's knowledge and use of syllables and segments.

Lexical organization and phonological change in treatment.

Word frequency and neighborhood density are properties of lexical organization that differentially influence spoken-word recognition. This study examined whether these same properties also affect spoken-word production, particularly as related to children with functional phonological delays. The hypothesis was that differential generalization would be associated with a word's frequency and its neighborhood density when manipulated as input in phonological treatment.

Precursors to onset clusters in acquisition.

Two lawful relationships involving word-initial onset clusters have been advanced in the acquisition literature; namely, that clusters imply affricates (Lleó & Prinz, 1996, 1997), and that liquid clusters imply a liquid distinction (Archibald, 1998). This study evaluated and extended the validity of these implicational laws in a population of 110 children (aged 3;0 to 8;6) with functional phonological delays who contributed extended speech samples for computational analyses. Results indicated that, for the most part, the composition of children's sound systems were in compliance with the proposed laws; however, there were noted asymmetries and apparent exceptions in the data.

Markedness and the grammar in lexical diffusion of fricatives.

This paper examines the contributions of markedness and a child's grammar to the process of lexical diffusion in phonological acquisition. Archival data from 19 preschoolers with functional phonological delays were submitted to descriptive analyses of productive sound change in fricatives. Children's presenting fricative inventory, the fricatives newly learned, and their position of occurrence were varied, with word frequency and neighbourhood density measured.

Minimal pair approaches to phonological remediation.

This article considers linguistic approaches to phonological remediation that emphasize the role of the phoneme in language. We discuss the structure and function of the phoneme by outlining procedures for determining contrastive properties of sound systems through evaluation of minimal word pairs. We then illustrate how these may be applied to a case study of a child with phonological delay.