Atypical phonological processes in naming errors of children with language impairment

ABSTRACT

The current study explored the characteristics of phonological errors of preschool children with DLD (Developmental Language Disorder), distinguishing between typical versus atypical phonological processes in segmental, syllabic and word levels. The analysis included 87 responses of words with phonological errors from a naming test, produced by 13 preschool children with DLD, aged 4;4–6;3 years. These responses included 166 phonological processes, which were classified into typical and atypical processes at the levels of: segments, syllables, and prosodic words. The findings revealed that 70% of the phonological processes were atypical. Furthermore, ten children produced more atypical processes, and there were more atypical than typical processes in segmental and word levels. It is suggested that some children with DLD represent phonological processes that are similar to those that children with speech and sound disorders produce. Therefore, clinically, the results emphasise the importance of analysing the typical and atypical characteristics of phonological errors as part of language assessment.

KEYWORDS:

• Naming
• phonological processes
• DLD
• phonological disorder

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

¹ For an overview of the change see Bishop et al. (2016), Novogrodsky and Kreiser (2019).

² In this study, we use the term “error” when referring to an erroneous word response in the naming task (i.e. a phonological error/paraphasia), and the term “process” when referring to the phonological errors (substitutions, deletions, etc.) within the erroneous word response. Because of the low number of errors produced by each of the participants in the study, we cannot make a claim for the existence of a specific phonological process for each individual child.

³ A phonological process is a mental operation that applies to a class of sounds presenting a specific difficulty of the speech capacity (Donegan & Stampe, 1979)..

⁴ Because words are acquired from the last and stressed syllables of the word to the first unstressed ones, most omissions are of the unstressed syllables or consonants of these syllables (Grunwell, 1985).

⁵ Three additional children from Biran et al.‘s study were excluded: one who did not produce any phonological errors (this participant, reported as EH in Biran et al., 2018, is presented as a case-study with dominant semantic errors), and two who produced only formal errors, namely, phonological errors that create another existing word.

Formal errors were not included in the current analysis to avoid an overlap between phonological and semantic errors, and the possible effects of word frequency and word familiarity on the analysis..

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.