Phonological awareness and phonological hierarchy in unintelligible speech: What does the child really ‘know’?

Abstract

Phonological awareness has been claimed to play an important role in the development of language skills, and it is essential that the child's phonological skills be assessed accurately in order to predict and to take early measures to help those that may encounter problems. Although the mora has attracted much attention in the discussion of phonological knowledge and phonological skills of Japanese, to our knowledge there are no previous studies that have assessed disordered speech of Japanese purely from the viewpoint of prosodic levels higher than the mora. In order to fill in this gap, this paper will present data from a child with ‘unintelligible speech’. The longitudinal data (4; 11 to 8;6) collected from spontaneous Japanese speech were analysed from the perspective of phonological markedness. The evidence so far indicates that even within severely distorted speech, it may be possible to tease out systematic errors that seem to suggest the existence of unmarked phonological structures such as the bimoraic foot. This finding suggests that in order to accurately assess a child's phonological ability, many different levels within the phonological hierarchy should be taken into consideration.

Keywords:

• Foot
• Japanese
• phonological awareness
• phonological hierarchy
• phonological knowledge
• unintelligible speech

Acknowledgement

We are grateful to X, the boy and his parents for their participation in this study. We also thank Tsutomu Sugawara and Chihiro Oda, for their assistance in preparing this work. This study has been supported in part by the Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Grant no. 20520435) to the first author.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflict of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.