Cross-linguistic comparison of speech errors produced by English- and French-speaking preschool-age children with developmental phonological disorders

Abstract

Twenty-four French-speaking children with developmental phonological disorders (DPD) were matched on percentage of consonants correct (PCC)-conversation, age, and receptive vocabulary measures to English-speaking children with DPD in order to describe how speech errors are manifested differently in these two languages. The participants’ productions of consonants on a single-word test of articulation were compared in terms of feature-match ratios for the production of target consonants, and type of errors produced. Results revealed that the French-speaking children had significantly lower match ratios for the major sound class features [+ consonantal] and [+ sonorant]. The French-speaking children also obtained significantly lower match ratios for [+ voice]. The most frequent type of errors produced by the French-speaking children was syllable structure errors, followed by segment errors, and a few distortion errors. On the other hand, the English-speaking children made more segment than syllable structure and distortion errors. The results of the study highlight the need to use test instruments with French-speaking children that reflect the phonological characteristics of French at multiple levels of the phonological hierarchy.

Keywords::

• Phonology
• speech sound disorders
• phonological errors
• cross-linguistic
• French

Acknowledgements

We are deeply grateful to the children and their parents who generously agreed to participate in the study. We thank the speech-language pathologists from the Montreal Children's Hospital, as well as the research assistants, speech-language pathologists, and clinical students who were part of the project. This research was supported by a Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to the second author and a Bourse de formation de doctorat from the Fonds de recherche en Santé du Québec to the first author. Researchers may contact either author and request transcribed copies of the raw data described in this report.

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