Detection of mispronunciations: A comparison of adults, normal-speaking children, and children with articulation errors

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Abstract
Recent studies have shown that children as well as adults can detect mispronounced words presented in running speech contexts. Listeners' detections are influenced by both phonological and lexical characteristics of the mispronounced words. The present study compared the performance of normal-speaking children, misarticulating children, and adults on a task which required the detection of mispronounced words. Phonological shifts presented in the stimuli represented both developmental and nondevelopmental patterns. Analysis of errors in detecting these mispronunciations indicated that adults were significantly more accurate than either group of children. In contrast, the performance of the two groups of children was relatively similar. Both children and adults more readily detected mispronunciations patterned after developmental errors than those mispronunciations manifesting more unusual, nondevelopmental sound shifts. Individual mispronounced words varied widely in their detectability. Nevertheless, those words which children found most difficult were also those on which adults most often erred. Parallels observed between the performance of the misarticulating children and their normally developing peers indicate that both younger groups use linguistic knowledge in a similar way in the perception of others' fluent speech.

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