Research regarding children's instrumental articulation development has provided the speech clinician with schedules of speech sound development. These developmental tables list ages when specific phonemes are mastered by normal children. Such schedules tend to give the impression that certain sounds must be developed before others can occur. Menyuk (1972) has expressed a similar point of view regarding phonemes /t/ and /k/. She has hypothesized: that phoneme /t/ must develop before phoneme /k/; and that sound element initial /t/ is mastered at an earlier age than initial /k/. The present investigation was designed to operationally test the validity of Menyuk's observations. The primary purpose of this study was to determine the ages at which phonemes /t/ and /k/ are mastered by normally developing children, thereby obtaining the order in which these phonemes are learned. A secondary purpose was to present an alternative to the concept of mastery of speech sounds by determining the ages at which children acquire phonemes /t/ and /k/. Four specific questions were posed by this study: Is phoneme /t/ mastered before phoneme /k/? Is sound element initial [t} mastered before initial [k]? What is the order of mastery of the remaining two sound elements of each phoneme? What is the order of acquisition of the two phonemes?

Since the 1930's Speech Correction has become an accepted and established part of the curriculum of many of the large, progressive public school systems of the United States, along with marked progress in the other field of Speech. For some years, speech magazines have been publishing tabulations of speech surveys made in thee city school systems. However, there is a notable lack of speech surveys made of country school districts; because there is little being done for rural, speech-handicapped child. In September 1937, a speech-correction, speech-improvement program was established to reach every school child in a 1 California rural country. Because of the twelve summer schools, this was to be a continual program, and was in effect until December 1942. The first year, or 1937, the speech supervisor in charge2 mad a survey of the speech of all school children in the county, which in the ensuing years became an annual survey of only the new students, and of those who did not pass the speech test of the year before. With the Spring of 1938, there came a large influx of population -- worker for the Shasta Dam and the subsidiary projects in the northern California area of the larger Central Valley Water Project, of the United States, Department of Interior. This growing, shifting, changing school population brought additional problems which affected the work of the speech supervisor. One of these problems was related to the surveys, and will be explained in the next paragraph. Although these annual surveys were used as background material to aid in planning the speech program for the coming year, for this study, because of the changing population, over the five and a half years' period, it seems impractical to draw comparisons or observe pupil-growth in speech education from year to year, as was originally planned. However, the surveys are revealing. It can be seen how basic the speech survey was in the whole program. In fact, the governing factor for some particular activity for a certain year depended somewhat upon the findings of the speech survey of the year before. The speech survey of 1941-1942 was chosen because it seemed to be a typical year from which to take speech samplings and to make a study of the findings, which is the subject of this thesis.

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