On the acquisition of liquids in European Portuguese: empirical contributions for the identification of clinical markers in phonological disorders

Abstract

Little is known on the phonological constituents in the grammar of children with phonological disorders. The few results available in the literature come from studies implementing nonword repetition tasks. In this paper, we used an assessment test built on the basis of the non-linear phonological approach (the CLCP – PE) to analyse the impact of the variables syllable constituency, word stress, word position and word length in the production of two of the most problematic root nodes in the phonological development of Portuguese children: /l/ and /ɾ/. Production data from Portuguese children with typical and atypical phonological development (SLI and SSD) will be compared, in order to contribute for the discussion on the use of /l/ and /ɾ/ in different prosodic positions as potential clinical markers in European Portuguese. The results reported in this paper show robust effects for all tested phonological variables in the typically developing children and the effect of syllable constituency, word position and word length in the atypically developing children, with no effect of word stress in the later.

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12957/matraga.2017.28714