Phonological Development

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A Language is defined as a system of message built by words and the mixture of words into sentences. A language system consist of five structural components namely phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax and pragmatics (Brandon, Salkind, Golinkoff& Hirsh Pasek,2006).These are inter-related and a child may have communicative difficulties if there is an inappropriate development of one or more of these components. Phonology is the study of how sounds are organized and used in different languages (Crystal 2004).Hoff (2005) stated that Children must learn to distinguish different sounds and to segment the speech stream into units which become meaningful over time order to acquire words and sentences. Phonological development refers mainly…show more content…
Therefore, specific sound combinations that occur more or less frequently in these initial words have been verified. According to Stampe (1969, 1979) the pattern of speech, that is, its phonological organization is governed by certain “universal phonological processes”. He claims that there is a universal set of natural phonological processes, which are innate. Thus, a phonological process is a mental operation that applies in speech to substitute for a class of sounds or sound sequences giving a common difficulty to the speech capacity of the individual, an alternative class identical but lacking the difficult property”. According to him, learning the sound system of a language involves suppressing a number of innate simplifying processes. As these processes are eliminated, the child develops an increased number of differences and eventually acquires the full set of sounds of the adult pattern…show more content…
Studies have been carried out in various Indian languages on phonological processes. Bharathy (2001) summarized the phonological process in 3 to 4 year old Tamil speaking children and found that cluster reduction, epenthesis, stopping for liquids and fricatives, nasal assimilation, voicing assimilation, initial consonant deletion, unstressed syllable deletion affrication and de-affrication persisted. Nisthar (2005) studied the development of phonological process in 3 to 4 year old Tamil speaking children and observed the phonological processes such as epenthesis, deaffrication, stopping, initial consonant deletion, backing, affrication, lateralization, medial syllable deletion, gliding, intervocalic deletion, assimilation, fronting, cluster reduction and

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