Speech perception and production abilities in a group of Italian preschoolers aged 72–78 months

Abstract

Objectives

The present work aims to contribute to the debate on the relationship between discrimination and production abilities in older pre-school-aged children and to fill a gap in the literature by providing evidence about this relationship in typically developing children speaking Italian, a language that is under-investigated.

Methods

Two novel tests, an AX ‘same/different’ phonological discrimination test and a phonetic test, were administered to a sample of Italian pre-school children aged 72–78 months. Discrimination was tested at the feature and the syllable levels. Production was analyzed for consonant repertoire and the presence of phonological processes, such as devoicing or consonant cluster reduction.

Results

In the AX test, significantly worse performance was found for syllables than for individual features. However, in production, no significant difference was found among phonological processes. No significant correlations were found between children’s performance in the two tests.

Conclusion

The current data suggest that children’s discrimination and production abilities for speech are still developing after age 6. There is no complete overlap between what children produce and what they discriminate. The implications of these findings for theories of language development are discussed.

Keywords:

• Non-word discrimination
• speech production
• pre-school children
• production-perception link

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Prof. Judit Gervain and the reviewers for their very helpful and valuable comments. We are grateful to the students who contributed to data collection, and to the children and families who participated in the study.

Author contributions

VG, AP, and CZ conceptualized the project, the methodology, and shared research assistant/student supervision. VG and CZ collected data. GL curated and visualized the data and drafted the first version of this report. GL and CZ worked on formal analysis and data validation. All authors contributed to project administration, reviewing and editing this report.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.