Acquisition of /s/-clusters in Hebrew-speaking children with phonological disorders

Abstract

This study examines the production and reduction patterns of initial /s/ clusters by Hebrew-speaking children with phonological disorders. Data were collected from 30 children with phonological disorders between the ages of 3;5–5;2. The data were elicited by means of a picture-naming task combined with a sentence completion task. Target words consisted of initial clusters, including #sC and #CC clusters. Results revealed that the percentage of correct productions of /s/+approximant clusters were significantly lower than those of the correct productions of other /s/ clusters. The differences between /s/+approximant clusters and the other /s/ clusters also emerged in the reduction patterns, where clusters from the first group were reduced to C1 but clusters from the second group were reduced to C2. There were no differences in the correct productions between the productions of SSP-violating clusters and the SSP-following clusters.

Keywords:

• /s/-clusters
• Hebrew
• phonological disorders

Acknowledgements

For their helpful feedback and valuable comments, we would like to thank Outi Bat-El, Yishai Tobin, Galit Adam, Limor Adi-Bensaid, Evan Cohen, and Mehmet Yavaş. We would also like to thank Ester Shabtai for her help with the statistical analysis. We are grateful to the parents and children who took part in the study.

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

Notes

1. /s/ clusters, i.e. clusters beginning with sibilant consonants. C1 in #/s/ clusters in Hebrew can be any of the sibilants in the language: /s, z, ʦ, ʃ/.

2. These restrictions are seldom violated (e.g. /vʁuˈda/ ‘pink (fm.)’, /χnun/ ‘nerd’, /spoʁt/ ‘sport’).

3. There were also 18 target words with non-/s/ clusters, which will not be discussed in this paper.

4. We separated /sl/ and /sʁ/ within the /s/+approximant clusters, since /ʁ/ is acquired relatively late in Hebrew and it tends to be misarticulated (deleted) by children with phonological disorders, so we preferred to look at each /s/+approximant cluster separately.

5. Statistical analysis was performed using the SAS for Windows version 9.1.3.

6. We decided not to include the /sp/ clusters in this comparison because we believe that its low percentage of correct production (7.5%) is due to its special status in Hebrew. First, /sp/ is very rare in Hebrew, as we explained earlier. Secondly, it only occurred in one target word (compared to two or three target words for the other clusters). And, finally, the word in which it occurred, ‘spaghetti’, was one of the three trisyllabic words in the data and all the trisyllabic words showed a low percentage of correct productions.