This investigation was concerned with reduction in duration of consonants in clusters relative to duration in unclustered contexts. Specifically, the investigation was designed: (a) to determine whether certain consonants' durations were significantly reduced in consonant clusters in adult speech, (b) to determine whether differences in the amount of such reduction existed between age groups, and (c) to determine whether a linear, trend correlating age with amount of consonant reduction existed. Five age groups with five subjects in each group repeated words with initial consonants /s/, /f/, /l/, /w/, /sl/, /fl/, and /sw/. The age groups tested included five-year-olds, seven-year-olds, nine-year-olds, and eleven-year-olds, and an adult control group. Subjects' utterances were recorded and oscillograms of the recordings were measured for consonant duration. Analysis of durations indicated that /s/ and /f/ durations were significantly reduced, in clusters by all age groups but no significant differences between groups existed in amount of reduction of these consonants. Duration of /w/ was not significantly reduced by any age group duration of /l/ was significantly changed by the five-year-old group only. This group lengthened duration of /l/ in clusters. A trend analysis of age correlated with reduction of /l/ demonstrated that amount of reduction of duration of /!/ increases linearly with age between five and eleven years. Consonant reduction was discussed in terms of speech timing programmes. Differences between age groups in consonant duration reduction were discussed in terms of processes observed in children's acquisition of consonant clusters, and possible differences in speech timing programmes used by children and adults. / Medicine, Faculty of / Audiology and Speech Sciences, School of / Graduate

The purpose of the study was to explore the development of psycho-linguistic ability in three- to five-year-old children, where psycholinguistic ability is defined in terms of seven tests of auditory word segmentation and auditory-visual integration of the symbols of literacy. The study was designed to explore three implicit questions: (a) developmental trends in the abilities of three- to five-year-olds on tasks of letter knowledge (identifying, naming and writing), hearing letter name sounds in spoken words, and hearing phonemes in spoken words; (b) the appropriateness of the tests for the age groups tested; and (c) the relative difficulty of the tests as a basis for suggesting an hierarchical order. A total of 75 preschoolers, including 11 three-year-olds, 33 four-year-olds, and 31 five-year-olds, were tested on the following tasks: (1) identifying letters named; (2) naming letters; (3) writing letters from dictation; (4) hearing letter name sounds in spoken words (oral and marking responses); and, (5) hearing phonemes in words (oral and marking responses). The data were analyzed in terms of the three implicit questions. When scores were analyzed for developmental trends through t-tests, statistically significant differences were found between four- and five-year-olds on all of the tests. Similar comparisons between three- and four-year-olds were not made because of the difficulty of the tests for three-year-olds. When the appropriateness of the tests was explored, only the test of identifying letter names was considered appropriate for the three-year-olds. Although even this test was considered somewhat difficult, results of the testing provided evidence that this psycho linguistic ability was beginning to emerge. For four-year-olds, the test of letter identification was considered appropriate. While the letter naming test did reveal some differentiation in performance for this age group, and so was considered marginally appropriate, the other tests were judged too difficult. All of the tests were considered appropriate for five-year-olds, although the two phonemes tests were clearly difficult. An informal inspection of the data resulted in the following hierarchy for difficulty of the tests, listed from easiest to most difficult: (1) identifying letters named; (2) letter name sounds in spoken words ((orals); (3) naming letters; (4) hearing letter name sounds in spoken words (marking); (5) writing letters from dictation; (6) hearing phonemes in words (marking); and, (7) hearing phonemes in words (oral). The two last named seemed almost equal in difficulty. The following observations were made through an analysis of the data: 1. Most of the children from age 5 years 7 months and up were able to identify most of the letters. 2. The ability to write most of the letters appeared to occur quite consistently from age 5 years 9 months. 3. Also from age 5 years 9 months, most children were able to identify letter name sounds in spoken words and to relate these to the printed symbols. 4. The tasks involving auditory word segmentation were the most difficult for all age levels. However, performance in this area appeared to show some stability from age 5 years 9 months. It was concluded that specific kinds of testing can provide considerable information about preschool children's knowledge in the area of psychol inguistic ability. Some implications and suggestions for further research were stated. / Education, Faculty of / Graduate

Language assessment of children is an essential task of the speech clinician and many studies have been concerned with the validity of the data gathered. Few studies, however, have investigated examiner variability as a possible source of deviation in language assessment. This study was designed to evaluate and compare the amount of verbal output which children with normal language use when examined by two different examiners when the examiners are in their most comfortable setting. Six children, four years of age, were examined by a speech pathologist in the clinic and the mother in the home and the 12 fifteen-minute taped episodes of dialogue were transcribed and subjected to mean length of response analysis by the Wilcoxon Matched-Pair Signed-Rank test of significance. Results indicate there is no statistical significance at the .05 level of confidence to the differences between results obtained by the examiners nor to the differences in results obtained between the first and second examination. The average MLR achieved by the subjects in this study does not reach those of previously established norms. A trend was evidenced for the speech pathologist to elicit greater amount of verbal output than the mothers and both the statistical non-significance of differences and the failure to reach previous norms may be an artifact due to the small sample size, method of recording, and examiner variability.

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