Characteristics of Lexical Stress in Hebrew-Speaking Children With Childhood Apraxia of Speech.

PURPOSE: The purpose of the present study was to explore the ability of Hebrew-speaking children with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) to produce lexical stress. METHOD: A total of 36 children aged between 4 and 7 years, 18 children with CAS, and 18 typically developing (TD) children participated in the study. All children completed language and speech assessments. The children imitated 20 weak-strong and strong-weak target words within short sentences and in isolation. Acoustic analysis of the vowels in the stressed and unstressed syllables of the target words and perceptual judgment of the words by six speech-language pathologists were conducted. RESULTS: The acoustic analysis showed significant differences in duration, fundamental frequency, and amplitude between stressed and unstressed vowels in weak-strong and strong-weak words and in both groups of children. The total duration for both the stressed and weak syllables was longer in children with CAS compared to TD children. Rated on a Likert scale of 1-5, where 5 indicates correct production, the productions of lexical stress in the CAS group were judged as above 4 on average but were significantly worse compared to the TD group. The target productions of children with CAS were judged as including excessive, equal, or misplaced stress in 10.8% of the productions, whereas 5.8% of the target productions of the TD children were judged as having inappropriate stress. CONCLUSIONS: The present findings suggest that Hebrew-speaking children with CAS produce the acoustic characteristics of lexical stress similarly to their peers, and their productions are perceived as having relatively good lexical stress (above 4), although not as good as TD children.

Error Patterns of Dorsal Rhotics: Evidence from Hebrew-Speaking Children.

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this paper was to describe the error patterns of the dorsal rhotic /ʁ̞/ in the speech of typically developing Hebrew-speaking children and to examine the prosodic effect (i.e., position in the word and stress pattern) of its production. Method and Participants: The participants included 50 monolingual Hebrew-speaking children aged 2;6-3;3 years. The children performed an articulation task in which they were asked to articulate 18 disyllabic words composed of vowel-adjacent rhotics in initial, medial, and final word positions in both stressed and unstressed syllables. RESULTS: The results revealed that dorsal rhotics were produced correctly in 78.7% of the target words. The main error patterns were rhotic deletion and devoicing. There were fewer correct productions in initial word positions than in both medial and final word positions. No stress effect was found. In addition, 76% of the children produced the consonant correctly in over half of their productions. CONCLUSIONS: The result demonstrating a higher rate of errors in initial word positions may be due to the relatively late acquisition of the initial onset position in multisyllabic Hebrew words. Alternatively, this finding may result from the greater degree of allophonic variation found in this position. The finding that languages with dorsal rhotics have unique error patterns compared to other rhotics strengthens the evidence that rhotic error patterns are dependent on the rhotics' phonetic characteristics.

The role of allophony and frequency in the acquisition of the Hebrew rhotic.

This article investigates the role of allophonic variation in phoneme acquisition and the clinical implications of this role. Specifically, we investigate the Hebrew rhotic /ʁ/. We analyse its production by Hebrew-acquiring children in various corpora, comparing the deletion, substitution and production in word-initial onset, intervocalic and word-final coda positions. The results are compared to the frequency of rhotics in a child-directed speech (CDS) corpus and in a Hebrew lexicon analysis. The study shows rhotics are acquired first in word-final codas, then in intervocalic position and finally as word-initial onsets. The order of acquisition, demonstrated by the deletion and substitution patterns, and the actual production of Hebrew rhotics correlate with the degree of allophonic variation. It does not, however, correlate with the frequency patterns observed in CDS and the Hebrew lexicon. Further study of allophonic variation and acquisition should include additional phonemes in Hebrew, as well as other languages.

Typical acquisition by atypical children: Initial consonant cluster acquisition by Israeli Hebrew-acquiring children with cochlear implants.

This paper studies the developmental stages of word initial consonant clusters (CCs) in the speech of six monolingual Israeli Hebrew (IH) acquiring hearing impaired children using cochlear implant (CI). Focusing on the patterns of cluster reduction, this study compares the CI children with typically-developing hearing children. All the CI children, three boys and three girls with age ranged from 1;5-2;8 years at their first recording session, were with pre-lingual hearing impairment with bilateral sensorineural hearing loss. Productions of word initial CCs were elicited in an isolated-word picture-naming task combined with spontaneously produced words. Data collection started 2-4 months after implantation and continued until the correct production of word initial biconsonantal clusters. Results reveal that both the developmental stages and reduction patterns of word initial CCs of the CI children are very similar to typically-developing IH acquiring children, thus supporting earlier studies which show that children with CIs follow the same stages of acquisition as hearing children.

Acquisition of /s/-clusters in Hebrew-speaking children with phonological disorders.

This study examines the production and reduction patterns of initial /s/ clusters by Hebrew-speaking children with phonological disorders. Data were collected from 30 children with phonological disorders between the ages of 3;5-5;2. The data were elicited by means of a picture-naming task combined with a sentence completion task. Target words consisted of initial clusters, including #sC and #CC clusters. Results revealed that the percentage of correct productions of /s/+approximant clusters were significantly lower than those of the correct productions of other /s/ clusters. The differences between /s/+approximant clusters and the other /s/ clusters also emerged in the reduction patterns, where clusters from the first group were reduced to C1 but clusters from the second group were reduced to C2. There were no differences in the correct productions between the productions of SSP-violating clusters and the SSP-following clusters.

Sonority and cross-linguistic acquisition of initial s-clusters.

This paper examines the findings and implications of the cross-linguistic acquisition of #sC clusters in relation to sonority patterns. Data from individual studies on English, Dutch, Norwegian, and Hebrew are compared for accuracy of production as well as the reductions with respect to potential differences across subtypes of #sC groups. In all four languages, a great deal of variability occurred both within and across children, but a number of general patterns were noted. While all four languages showed similar behaviour in reduction patterns, clear differences between the three Germanic languages-English, Dutch, and Norwegian-and Hebrew were found in the accuracy rate of #sC clusters that have a larger sonority distance between C1 and C2, in a binary split of /s/+[+cont.] versus /s/+[-cont.], and in #sC clusters versus non-/s/-clusters. Patterns in cluster reductions were, in general, supportive of the factorial typology of Pater and Barlow, while pointing at some difficulties for the predictions of the headedness approach advanced by Goad and Rose, and Jongstra. This cross-linguistic description of patterns of s-clusters increases our knowledge of typical phonological development and helps selecting targets in clinical context.