Morphophonemic Rule Learning in Normal and Articulation-Disordered Children

This study investigated the phonological learning abilities of articulation-disordered children. Eight normally speaking and eight articulation-disordered kindergarten children were taught an artificial morphophonemic rule. The rule required the subjects to extract and organize phonological information by differentiating among the critical features of stop and fricative consonants. A miniature artificial language paradigm was used to teach the rule by auditorily presenting a limited number of examples of the rule and measuring generalization to untaught items. The groups were compared to determine if they differed in rate or accuracy of learning and generalization of the correct response. Individual patterns of learning were also examined. Results revealed essentially no differences in the way the two groups learned the stop class. In contrast, the disordered children incorporated fricatives into the rule more quickly than the normal children did. In addition, there was a trend for the disordered children to respond with more accuracy and more generalized responses to the fricatives. This trend was unexpected and is discussed in terms of a sensitive period for learning phonological information.

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