Intervening factors to the correct production of (c)vc syllables in typical and atypical speech data

Abstract

This study aimed to verify the influence of extralinguistic, prosodic, and syllabic variables to the correct production of (C)VC syllables in children with typical and atypical phonological development. We analyzed speech data of 36 children. Dependent variables: correct production of the syllable, epenthesis, metathesis, coda omission, syllable omission and coalescence. Intervening variables: tonicity, number of syllables, preceding syllable context, following syllable context, word position, syllable onset complexity, coda segmental complexity and position of the (C)VC syllable in relation to the “metrical foot”. Extralinguistic variables: age, sex and type of phonological acquisition. The results showed as relevant to the correct production of blocked syllables for the typical speech data were age, sex, tonicity, word position, syllable onset complexity and coda segmental complexity. Except tonicity and syllable onset complexity, all other variables were selected as statistically significant for the atypical data. The variable type of phonological development was selected. Besides, it was identified in the typical cases a higher frequency and probability of blocked syllable correct production.