The word sound structures distribution as a quantative measure for speech development

Abstract

Studies in phonological development usually focus on the acquisition of separate segments and the quality of their realization, while much less is still known about the development of whole-word patterns. The analysis of the wholeword structure, or word shape, addresses word structure patterns (WSPs) that are mastered and constantly used by children in their speech. The aim of the current study was to analyze the distribution of syllable and WSPs in the corpus of Russian typically-developing children’s discourse. The study was based on the corpus data (orthographically transcribed texts) of Russian-speaking monolingual children (n = 14; the mean age was ~68 months). The data included 28 fictional narratives and 14 conversational reasoning dialogues between a child and an experimenter. By means of specially designed software the PASTA, words were structurally analyzed and classified into 22 groups according to the basic types of syllable structure of a Russian word. Then, the percentage distribution of these structures was estimated. Statistical analysis revealed that the distribution of syllable types was quite similar between the children and adult speech data; in children, this measure did not depend on the discourse genre (narrative vs. conversational reasoning dialogue). The WSPs distribution, in contrary, discriminated children from adults and was significantly influenced by the discourse genre.