Analysis of stop consonant production errors in developmentally dysphasic children

Abstract

The speech production skills of 12 dysphasic children and of 12 normal children were compared. The dysphasic children had significantly greater difficulty than the normal children in producing stop consonants. Seven of the dysphasic children, who had difficulty in perceiving initial stop consonants, had greater difficulty in producing stop consonants than the remaining 5 dysphasic children who showed no such perceptual difficulty. A detailed phonetic analysis indicated that the dysphasic children seldom omitted stops or substituted nonstop for stop consonants. Errors were predominantly of voicing or place of articulation. Acoustic analyses suggested that the voicing errors were related to lack of precise control over the timing of speech events; specifically, voice onset time for initial stops and vowel duration preceding final stops. The number of voicing errors on final stops was greater than expected on the basis of lack of differentiation of vowel duration alone. They appeared to be related to a tendency in the dysphasic children to produce final stops with exaggerated aspiration. The possible relationship of poor timing control in speech production in these children and auditory temporal processing deficits in speech perception is discussed.