ATYPICAL PHONOLOGICAL PROCESSES IN THE UTTERANCES OF NIGERIAN ENGLISH-SPEAKING CHILDREN WITH SPEECH IMPAIRMENT

Abstract

A crucial tool for self-expression and social interaction among
humans is speech, making investigations focused on speech clarity
and speech intelligibility germane in language research. This study
assesses the articulation of selected speech-impaired children with
cerebral palsy who are between the ages of seven and thirteen in order
to identify the specific phonological processes observable in their
speech in comparison with the speech of children who are
neurotypical. The data was obtained by recording the speech of the
children as they were engaged in a picture-naming task with flashcards
of pictures representing target words, covering all the twenty-four
English consonant sounds. Stampe and Donegan’s theory of Natural
Phonology (1979, 2004 & 2009), which explicates that phonological
processes assume that both children and adults have a natural
tendency to simplify articulation serves as the theoretical framework
for the study. The analysis reveals that only 28.5% of the speech
tokens produced by the speech impaired participants were correctly
articulated in relation to 95% of correct tokens produced by the
control participant, a child without speech impairment. Cluster
reduction, initial consonant deletion, and final consonant deletion
are a few of the phonological processes found in the speech of the
children with the most prevalent being cluster reduction.