Category: Writing

You are trying to note salience and avoidance factors in the
speech of a 2;6-year-old child. Would it be better to use spontaneous speech or
an articulation test? Or would both be necessary to determine these factors?
Why?
Why are salience and avoidance
factors important to consider when assessing a young child? Can you think of
some ways to get information on salience and avoidance from the child’s
caregivers to supplement your assessment?

Consider the vowel and consonant data that were just
presented and make a list of the consonants, vowels, and syllable structures
you might see in the beginning words of children.
Based on your list, formulate 15
words that contain these vowels, consonants, and syllable shapes (and would be
age appropriate) that you could use when working with a child who is just
beginning to say first words.

Based on the information from the prelinguistic stages, what
stage should a child be in before you can hope to verbally stimulate him or her
and possibly expect imitative behavior?
You are working in a birth to
three-year program and have a child who you think is beginning to attempt to
imitate simple babbling behavior. Based on the information on the most frequent
babbled sounds, what type of syllables, vowels, and consonants might you want
to attempt to use as stimulation?

Will parents who provide early and frequent stimulation to
their young children produce earlier talkers? List two reasons why this is not
possible.
One of the reasons it is often
difficult to understand a toddler is because of his or her voice quality.
Explain why the voice quality of children around age one sounds differently.
Refer back to point 4, for example, in the previous list.

If you examine the four typical properties of syllables from
Archangeli and Langendoen (1997) and think about the speech patterns noted in
children with speech sound disorders, do they seem more to violate or adhere to
these properties? Think about the high use of final consonant deletion or
consonant cluster reduction.

According to nonlinear analysis, two basic operations may
occur: spreading (also known as linking) and deletion (also known as
delinking). Are the following transcriptions examples of spreading or
delinking? Explain why for each: [lɛlo
ʊ
] for “yellow,” [kʌ]
for “cup,” [fɪndɚ] for “finger.”

The term underlying representation was discussed at the
beginning of this chapter (page 68). The construct of radical
underspecification is another theoretical idea about what the underlying representation
actually is. In this case, it is thought that unpredictable features are
contained in the underlying representation. What would be a predictable feature
of [l] and [r] in General American English? What would be an unpredictable
feature of the affricates? A predictable feature?

Metrical phonology does provide an explanation as to why children maintain—and delete—certain syllables. Look at the following metrical trees for common words that children shorten.
A child you are working with has difficulty with weak syllables. Draw the metrical tree for “elephant” and “telephone.” Based on the metrical trees, what would you predict the child would say?

According to autosegmental phonology, [+ and – round]
spreads from a vowel to an adjacent consonant within a syllable. Show the + and
– features on the words: “toothbrush, spoon,” and “wood.”
According to autosegmental
phonology, [+ and – round] spreads from a consonant to an adjacent consonant up
to a vowel. Show the + and – features for the words “swing, brushed,” and
“twist.”

A child demonstrates a high degree of fronting (velar only),
cluster reduction, and final consonant deletion.
Can you give one example of each of these processes? Which
of these processes would probably affect intelligibility the most?