Exploring word production in three-year-old monolingual French-speaking children

ABSTRACT

There is a general need for more knowledge on the development of French phonology, and little information is currently available for typically developing French-speaking three-year-old children. This study took place in Belgium and explores the accuracy of speech production of 34 typically developing French-speaking children using a picture naming task. Measures of speech accuracy revealed lower performance than previously seen in the literature. We investigated speech accuracy across different phonological contexts in light of characteristics of target words that are known to have an influence on speech production, namely the condition of production (spontaneous vs. imitated), the length of the word (in number of syllables), syllable complexity (singleton vs. cluster) and positional complexity (onset vs. coda). Results indicate that the accuracy of words produced spontaneously did not differ from imitated words. The presence of consonant clusters in the target word was associated with lower performance on measures of Percentage of Consonants Correct and Whole Word Proximity for both 1- and 4-syllable words. Singleton codas were produced less accurately than onsets in 1-syllable words. Word-internal singleton codas were produced less accurately than final codas. In our sample, 1-syllable words showed surprisingly low levels of performance which we can explain by an over-representation of phonologically complex properties in the target words used in the present study. These results highlight the importance of assessing various aspects of phonological complexity in French speech tasks in order to detect developmental errors in typically developing children and, ultimately, help identify children with speech sound disorders.

KEYWORDS:

• Speech sound development
• consonant accuracy
• French
• preschool children

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the many children, parents, teachers and principals for their participation and support. They would also like to give special thanks to Fanny Dieu and all the speech-language therapy students who helped in data collection, phonetic transcription or data-coding. They acknowledge statistical advice from Vincent Didone. Finally, they extend their gratitude to Geneviève Meloni for providing an adapted version of the picture naming task in EULALIES.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data underlying the study are available on https://phon.talkbank.org in the French corpora.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ For a comprehensive overview of the adult phonological system in French and its differences with English phonology, see, Bérubé et al. (2013), MacLeod et al. (2011), and Rose and Wauquier-Gravelines (2007) and Rvachew et al. (2013).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Fond de la Recherche Scientifique F.R.S-FNRS under Grant FRESH 40004234.