Consonant inventories in the spontaneous speech of young children: A bootstrapping procedure

Abstract

Consonant inventories are commonly drawn to assess the phonological acquisition of toddlers. However, the spontaneous speech data that are analysed often vary substantially in size and composition. Consequently, comparisons between children and across studies are fundamentally hampered. This study aims to examine the effect of sample size on the resulting consonant inventories. A spontaneous speech corpus of 30 Dutch-speaking 2-year-olds was used. The results indicate that in order to construct and compare inventories reliably, they should be drawn from speech samples that are equally large. A new consonant inventory procedure is introduced. The implementation of this procedure demonstrates considerably less variation in inventory size across children and word positions than reported previously. This finding has important implications for clinical studies that constructed and compared inventories of typically and atypically developing children without normalizing the sample size.

• phonological acquisition
• child language
• consonant inventory

Acknowledgements

The research reported in this article was supported by a TOP-BOF grant of the Research Council of the University of Antwerp. We thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for insightful comments. We are especially indebted to all the children and parents who participated in this study.

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

Notes

1. This implies that a consonant should occur more often in a large sample than in a small sample in order to be included in the inventory. Note that the unit of analysis is the word and not the consonant. In study (2), it was shown that the consonant is a more appropriate unit than the word.