Phonological Errors in Children’s Language Development

In the early stages of language development, children’s phonological stage is when they’ve often made ‘errors’ in their language, but this will differ depending on the child. Babies at the age of 18-24 months go into their two-word combinations and later at 24-40 months enter their telegraphic by which they will have up to 6-word combinations of vowel and consonant words. Although this maybe the case; children already know how to speak. At the babbling stage, babies are around 6-12 months old and will start to make repeated-consonant vowel sounds.

Babbling is the process of where a CVCV structure is formed through vowel & consonant functions that come with it. The first one is the babbling reduplication where there is a repetition of CVCV structure & the variegated babbling where babies make a different combinations of CVCV structure like ‘daga’ opposed to the ‘gaga’ of the reduplication. Children will often make many errors in their speech such as leaving out the last part of a consonant at the end of a word such as ‘fish’. This is known as deletion.

Another classic example of a phonological error is substitution in which a child would swap a difficult pronunciation-sound or word for an easier sound or pronunciation like ‘knee’ to ‘pee’. But children also will add a sound to their CVCV structure like ‘chow-chow’ or ‘wee wee’. This falls under the act of reduplication of which children tend to add a particular sound or pattern to sounds such as ‘choo-choo’. We know this through the ‘Fish Phenomenon’ that Berko and Brown researched through children.

The case showed that children would delete a word or sound that had a consonant cluster reduction in where a child doesn’t use the fricative sound in a word like ‘sh’ in ‘fish’. Therefore they would create a stop sound to say the word that has a consonant cluster, bout would stop at sudden holt like ‘t’ or ‘d’. For instance, a child would say ‘thing’ but, they’d say ‘ting’ or change ‘zebra’ to ‘debra’. This is because it is easier to form through their mouths.

The same study found that when children said a word incorrect such as saying ‘wimming’ instead of ‘swimming’, their parent would then correct them on the correct pronunciation. Even though the child is wrong, they’d inform their parent that what they correctly said was in fact wrong. This showed that children were making phonological mistakes that were production-based, or was misunderstood too. Intonation serves a great deal of importance when understanding children as their phonological stage is still developing.

For parents alike, it’s important because it helps the parent know the stages of where their child is and should be at. During the intonation process, toddlers can’t form grammatically complete utterances so they will start using single recognisable words for two or more objects or using social words. This predominately starts to begin in the holophrastic stage. Intonation is the process of when a child will know what an object is but tend to associate different meanings, thoughts or feelings towards it.

For example, a child could say ‘car’ or at the two-word stage using the phoneme ‘my car’. And this could be seen and interpret as many different things. They could be informing you that they want you to play with them, letting you know it’s theirs or just telling you it’s in visible sight. Finally, you can start to distinguish a value of different combinations of lexis and semantically change that will possibly change during the action of child language development.