PHONOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT

Phonological development is a complex process that depends on the child’s ability to attend to sound sequences,produce sounds, and combine them into understandable words and phrases.

The early phase: Children's first words are influenced in part by the small number of sounds they can  pronounce ( Hura and Echols,1996 ; Vihman 1996 ) . The easiest sound sequences start with consonents and with vowels , and include repeated syllables , as in “mama”,”dada”. Sometimes young speaker use the same sound to represent a variety of words a feature that makes their speech hard to understand. 1 year old first learning to talk know how familiar words – such as “dog” , “baby” , “ball” – are supposed to sound , even when they mispronounce them. Researchers showed fourteen months pairs of objects( such as a baby and a dog) , accompanied by a voice speaking the word for one of the objects , with either correct pronunciation (baby), slight mispronunciation (vaby), or considerable mispropunciation (raby),(Swingley ans Aslin,2002). The toddlers easily detected the correct pronunciation of words they ad heard many times. They looked longer at the appropriate object when a word was pronounced correctly then when it was either mildly or extremely mispronounced.When learning  new word , toddlers often do not pic up the fine details of its sound a failure that contributes to their pronunciation errors. Toddlers don’t apply their impressive sensitivity to speech sounds when acquiring new words because associating words with their referents  places extra demands on toddler’s limited working memories. Intend on communicating they focus on the word – referent pairing while the world’s sounds, which they encode imprecisely.

Appearance of phonological strategies : By the middle of the second year children move from trying to pronounce whole syllables and words to trying to pronounce each individual sound within a word. As a result they can be heard experimenting with phoneme patterns . Because young children get more practice perceiving and producing phoneme patterns that occur frequently in their language , they pronounce words that contain those patterns more accurately and rapidly. Words that are unique in how they sound are generally different to pronounce (Mounsun,2001).A close look reveals that children apply systematic strategies to challenging words so that these words fit with these pronunciation capacities yet resemble adult utterances although individual differences exist in the precise strategies that children adopt they follow a general developmental pattern(Viman 1996).At first , children produce minimal words in which they focus on the stressed syllable and try to pronounce its consonant-vowel combination. Soon they add ending consonents (“jus”), adjust vowel length(“beee” for please), and add unstressed syllables(“mae-do” for “tomato”). Finally they produce the full word with a correct stress pattern, although they may still need to refine its sounds(“ timemba” for “ remember”)(Demuth,1996;Salidis and Johnson,1997).over the preschool years children's pronunciation improves greatly.maturation of the vocal tract and the child's active problem solving effort are largely responsible,since children’s phonological errors are very resistant t adult correction.

Later phonological development-Although phonological development is largely completed by age 5, a few syllable stress patterns that signal subtle differences in meaning are acquired in middle childhood and adolescence.Changes in syllabic stress after certain abstract words take on endings-“humid” to “ humidity” are not mastered untll adolescence (Camarata and Leaonard ,1986).These late attainments are probably affected by the semantic complexity of the words , in that hard-to-understand words are more difficult to pronounce.even at later age, working simultaneously on the sound and meaning of a new word may over load the cognitive system,causing children to sacrifice pronounciation temporarily until they better grasp the word’s meaning