A Study on Criteria for Assessing Young Children's Phonology.

The purpose of this study is to develop assessment criteria for young children���s phonology in L1 acquisition of Korean. We have established accuracy of segmental articulation and fluency of utterance as major assessing criteria including various lengths of samples and diverse phonological context. To verify the assessment criteria established by this study, we have performed a pilot study by employing children at 3-5 years of age and analyzed 2,580 speech samples from them. The outcome of our analysis is as the followings: (1) The average score for accuracy of articulation gradually increased by children���s age. This indicates that the assessment criteria for articulation accuracy reflect age-specific development of the children. (2) PCR(percentage of correct responses) was the highest at affricate and the lowest at diphthong. In case of articulation of connected segments, PCR was the lowest at velar-bilabial sequence. (3) When we analyzed item discrimination based on the difference in success rates between higher and lower groups, we found the highest difference at fricative in case of accuracy of articulation. The discrimination was absent at word-initial /���/ and word- final /���/, suggesting that these are not suitable as assessment criteria for phonology of children at the age of 3-5. (4) The correlation ratio between accuracy and fluency was .450 (p<.001), confirming positive correlation in the phonology examination item