Development of singleton consonants in French-speaking children with typical versus protracted phonological development: The influence of word length, word shape and stress

Abstract

Purpose

To provide preliminary reference data for singleton consonant development in children with typical development (TD) versus protracted phonological development (PPD) for Manitoba Canadian French, a language with an uncommon stress pattern (“iambic” or “right-headed”). Following a nonlinear perspective, singleton consonants were examined both as segments and in terms of the structure of words. Higher match levels for consonants were expected in shorter versus longer words and in stressed versus unstressed syllables. A larger effect was expected in children with PPD than those with TD.

Method

Participants included 20 TD children and 12 with PPD aged 2 to 4 years from Manitoba, Canada. Single words were digitally recorded by trained speech-language pathologists, transcribed by native French speakers and analysed with Phon 3.0.

Result

Friedman and Wilcoxon Signed Rank tests revealed that children with PPD had significantly more mismatches than TD children, especially in contexts of unstressed syllables in multisyllabic words. The most common mismatch (“error”) patterns were consonant substitution, consonant deletion and syllable deletion.

Conclusion

Word length and stress were found to influence consonant development within French, similar to findings in languages with left-headed or trochaic stress. Clinically, the findings underscore the relevance of considering the child’s entire phonological system for identification of strengths and needs in assessment and intervention.

Keywords:

• Speech-sound disorders
• prominence
• word length
• whole word match
• word shape match
• Canadian French phonology

Declaration of Interest

The authors report no conflict of interest.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/17549507.2020.1829706.

Notes

1 Percent consonant match (PCM) was defined as the proportion of singleton consonants matching adult targets (used rather than percent consonant correct because the term “match” represents how a child’s productions may correspond to dialectal variation across adult speakers in the community).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (410-2009-0348,611-2012-0164) and University of Ottawa (148689).