Consonant production and intelligibility in cri du chat syndrome

Abstract

This article focuses on consonant productions by a group of children with cri du chat syndrome (CdCS) and examines how various aspects of these productions contribute to these children's overall intelligibility. Eight children and adolescents with CdCS participated in the study, and the following four questions were addressed: (1) What are the characteristic features of the consonant inventories of the subjects in terms of size and types of consonants; (2) how do the subjects render the consonant phonemes of the target language; (3) to what degree do the subjects produce target-like words; and (4) what is the relationship between consonant production and intelligibility? For the majority of our subjects, we found low proportions of correctly produced consonants, small consonant inventories with several recurrent types of deviant consonants, inaccuracy in realization of target phonemes and variable similarity to target words, all of which may contribute to reduced intelligibility.

• Consonant production
• cri du chat syndrome
• intelligibility
• phonological inventories

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the children who participated in this study and their parents. We also thank our five colleagues who provided intelligibility ratings for the speech of the eight children. Also thanks to Marilyn Vihman, Marianne Lind and Inger Moen for generous and critical comments, from whom the paper has improved in many respects. The two CLP reviewers also gave us a number of useful comments and suggestions. This research has been presented at the following conferences: Preconference workshop on phonological acquisition at the 13th Meeting of the International Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics Association, 2010, and the 2nd Nordic Conference in Clinical Linguistics, 2011. We are grateful to the audiences at these conferences for their valuable feedback.

Notes

¹When we describe these children's target dialect as an eastern variant of Norwegian, we are referring to a larger geographical region within Norway than that covered by the UEN variety. However, for the purposes of this study, this difference is of little significance.

²In the introductory discussion, we have pointed to variability as a factor contributing to lack of intelligibility. One of the reviewers has commented that our data does not allow for much examination of variability. We agree and have therefore not included a separate question on variability.

³One of CLP's reviewers expresses a reservation about the validity of measuring intelligibility on the basis of a single word task (and for which the rater knew the targets). We agree to some extent with this. However, given the limitations on these children's language, this type of test is perhaps the only possible way to collect speech data from children with CdCS, and we have therefore chosen to include these measures.

⁴We have not investigated the effect of deviant vowel productions on intelligibility. However, Kristoffersen (2005) examined vowel productions of three children with CdCS and found that they were both variable and to a little extent similar to target vowels.