Validity Evidence for the LittlEARS Early Speech Production Questionnaire: An English-Speaking, Canadian Sample

Abstract This study examined a potential lexicality advantage in young children's early speech production: do children produce sound sequences less accurately in nonwords than real words? Children aged 3;3-4;4 completed two tasks: a real word repetition task and a corresponding nonword repetition task. Each of the 23 real words had a paired consonant-vowel sequence in the nonword in word-initial position (e.g., ‘su’ in [ˈsutkes] ‘suitcase’ and [ˈsudrɑs]). The word-initial consonant-vowel sequences were kept constant between the paired words. Previous work on this topic compared different sequences of paired sounds, making it hard to determine if those results were due to a lexical or phonetic effect. Our results show that children reliably produced consonant-vowel sequences in real words more accurately than nonwords. The effect was most pronounced in children with smaller receptive vocabularies. Together, these results reinforce theories arguing for interactions between vocabulary size and phonology in language development.

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Underlying manifestations of developmental phonological disorders in French-speaking pre-schoolers

Journal of Child Language ◽

10.1017/s0305000916000556 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 44 (6) ◽

pp. 1337-1361

Author(s):

FRANÇOISE BROSSEAU-LAPRÉ ◽

SUSAN RVACHEW

Keyword(s):

Speech Production ◽

Phonological Processing ◽

Speech Impairment ◽

Motor Impairments ◽

Phonological Disorders ◽

Oral Motor ◽

Quebec French ◽

French Speaking ◽

English Speaking ◽

Overt Speech

AbstractThis study examined the psycholinguistic profiles of Quebec French-speaking children with developmental phonological disorders (DPD). The purpose was to determine whether the endophenotypes that have been identified in English-speaking children with DPD are similarly associated with speech impairment in French-speaking children. Seventy-two children with DPD and ten children with normally developing speech, aged four to six years, received a comprehensive assessment battery that included measures at the phenotype level (i.e. measures of overt speech production skills) and endophenotype level (i.e. measures of potential underlying core deficits such as phonological processing or oral motor impairments). The majority of the children with DPD presented with a psycholinguistic profile indicative of difficulties with phonological processing. Phonological processing skills also explained unique variance in speech production accuracy, indicating that French-speaking children with DPD, who produce different surface speech errors than English-speaking children with DPD, are nonetheless very similar with regards to their underlying psycholinguistic profile.

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Exposure to a second language in infancy alters speech production

Bilingualism Language and Cognition ◽

10.1017/s1366728919000853 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 23 (5) ◽

pp. 978-991

Author(s):

Megha Sundara ◽

Nancy Ward ◽

Barbara Conboy ◽

Patricia K. Kuhl

Keyword(s):

Second Language ◽

Language Learning ◽

Speech Production ◽

English Learning ◽

Early Exposure ◽

Short Term ◽

Short Term Exposure ◽

English Speaking ◽

The Impact ◽

English Monolingual

AbstractWe evaluated the impact of exposure to a second language on infants’ emerging speech production skills. We compared speech produced by three groups of 12-month-old infants while they interacted with interlocutors who spoke to them in Spanish and English: monolingual English-learning infants who had previously received 5 hours of exposure to a second language (Spanish), English- and Spanish-learning simultaneous bilinguals, and monolingual English-learning infants without any exposure to Spanish. Our results showed that the monolingual English-learning infants with short-term exposure to Spanish and the bilingual infants, but not the monolingual English-learning infants without exposure to Spanish, flexibly matched the prosody of their babbling to that of a Spanish- or English-speaking interlocutor. Our findings demonstrate the nature and extent of benefits for language learning from early exposure to two languages. We discuss the implications of these findings for language organization in infants learning two languages.

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Some influences on the grammar of English- and Italian-speaking children with specific language impairment

Applied Psycholinguistics ◽

10.1017/s0142716400000448 ◽

1988 ◽

Vol 9 (1) ◽

pp. 39-57 ◽

Cited By ~ 51

Author(s):

Laurence B. Leonard ◽

Letizia Sabbadini ◽

Virginia Volterra ◽

Jeanette S. Leonard

Keyword(s):

Speech Production ◽

Language Impairment ◽

Specific Language Impairment ◽

Surface Characteristics ◽

Spontaneous Speech ◽

Specific Language ◽

Specific Effects ◽

Grammatical Morphemes ◽

English Speaking ◽

Syntactic Differences

ABSTRACTThe spontaneous speech of both English-speaking (E) and Italian-speaking (I) children with specific language impairment (SLI) was examined to determine (a) whether phonological factors influence the grammatical morpheme use of ISLI children, as has been found for ESLI children, and (b) whether ESLI and ISLI children show similar syntactic abilities at the same level of mean utterance length as measured in words. The results indicated that word-final consonants adversely influenced the ISLI children's tendency to use articles – the only Italian grammatical morphemes in which word-final consonants are required. There was no evidence of syntactic differences between the ESLI and ISLI children. However, both groups of children seemed to have a problem using morphemes that constituted unstressed elements in a sentence even though the grammatical and semantic function of these elements varied across the two languages. The findings suggest that a speech production or perception component may be playing a greater role than previously believed in contributing to SLI children's well-documented expressive grammatical difficulties, though the specific effects of this factor will vary as a function of the surface characteristics of the language being acquired.

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The impact of early infant jaw‐orthopaedics on early speech production in toddlers with unilateral cleft lip and palate

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics ◽

10.1080/02699200410001663353 ◽

2004 ◽

Vol 18 (4-5) ◽

pp. 259-284 ◽

Cited By ~ 18

Author(s):

Anette Lohmander ◽

Malin Lillvik ◽

Hans Friede

Keyword(s):

Speech Production ◽

Cleft Lip ◽

Cleft Lip And Palate ◽

Early Infant ◽

Early Speech ◽

The Impact

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THE ROLE OF AGE OF ACQUISITION IN LATE SECOND LANGUAGE ORAL PROFICIENCY ATTAINMENT

Studies in Second Language Acquisition ◽

10.1017/s0272263115000248 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 37 (4) ◽

pp. 713-743 ◽

Cited By ~ 19

Author(s):

Kazuya Saito

Keyword(s):

Second Language ◽

Speech Production ◽

Speech Rate ◽

Oral Proficiency ◽

Age Of Acquisition ◽

Age Effects ◽

Japanese Learners Of English ◽

Global Quality ◽

English Speaking ◽

Japanese Learners

The current project examined whether and to what degree age of acquisition (AOA), defined as the first intensive exposure to a second language (L2) environment, can be predictive of the end state of postpubertal L2 oral proficiency attainment. Data were collected from 88 experienced Japanese learners of English and two groups of 20 baseline speakers (inexperienced Japanese speakers and native English speakers). The global quality of their spontaneous speech production was first judged by 10 native English-speaking raters based on accentedness (linguistic nativelikeness) and comprehensibility (ease of understanding) and was then submitted to segmental, prosodic, temporal, lexical, and grammatical analyses. According to the results, AOA was negatively correlated with the accentedness and comprehensibility components of L2 speech production, owing to relatively strong age effects on segmental and prosodic attainment. Yet significant age effects were not observed in the case of fluency and lexicogrammar attainment. The results suggest that AOA plays a key role in determining the extent to which learners can attain advanced-level L2 oral abilities via improving the phonological domain of language (e.g., correct consonant and vowel pronunciation and adequate and varied prosody) and that the temporal and lexicogrammatical domains of language (e.g., optimal speech rate and proper vocabulary and grammar usage) may be enhanced with increased L2 experience, regardless of age.

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