Phonological development notes

While learning to speak they use many ways of making language more accessible to them so they can learn it.

The main points in each age gap are:-

0-3 months

• When first born they have a birth cry that is undifferentiated which progresses to coos and gurgling.
• From this they then use sounds to try and communicate what they mean.
• Parents use blowing raspberries as a way of getting babies to use their tongue and lips.

1-2 years

• Children can start to use intonation which is using pitch and tone in different ways such as children raising their pitch to ask a question.
• They can repeat sounds or words but don’t necessarily understand what they mean.
• They omit consonant clusters as some combinations can be too hard to pronounce.
• Towards 2 years old they understand about 65% of what they are saying.

3-4

• At this age children miss out the last consonant such as ‘walkin’ and miss the ‘g’ sound off.
• Also their speech becomes ‘intelligible’ which means that through speech they can be understood by people.

There are also many techniques that are used by children to help develop their speech. These are a few of them.

Velar Fronting (fronting)

This means that children will use sounds that are made at the front of the mouth instead of those that would normally be made at the back of their mouth. For example ‘cup’ would then be pronounced ‘tub’ as the‘t’ sound is easier to make instead of the ‘c’ sound.

Unstressed Syllable Deletion

This means that when they say a particular word they would remove the syllable in the word that is stressed the least when pronounced. Therefore ‘telephone’ would become ‘tefon’ as the ‘le’ sound is the least stressed so considered not as important.

Reduplication

When a child has a word they would like to say they would then use one syllable repeated twice to represent what they mean. One example would be ‘baba’ which could mean ‘bottle’

Dimunization (dim)

This occurs when a child adds the sound ‘-ee’ to the end of a word like a suffix. So a normal word such as ‘book’ would then become ‘book-ee’