Unreliability of precocious phonological processes in French children with normal or abnormal language development

Many phonological theories underline the importance of phonological rules and phonological processes. Children with language disorders often have difficulties with phonological rules and exhibit abnormal phonological processes, which differentiate them from children with normal language development (NLD) (Ingram, 1989). In a previous study, the spontaneous production of young NLD French children (aged 2;3 to 4;0) was compared with the production of language-matched children with SLI (aged 3;0 to 7;0). Although specific difficulties were found in phonology between NLD children and children with SLI, no difference in the nature and number of phonological processes could be found and the variety of their errors was too important to categorize the children according to their use of phonological processes. One explanation for this absence of results could be that the children's language was not developed enough to find reliable phonological processes at work.The longitudinal corpus of an NLD child was used to control this hypothesis and to check whether the nature of phonological processes as well as variations from the adult target changed along the course of language development in young children. The child was followed at one month intervals from age 1;08 to 2;05. Each recording was transcribed for phonology and the phonological variations and processes were identified for each word produced by the child.Results showed that the nature of the phonological variations and processes remained stable through development although the quality of phonological production increased in a dramatic fashion. The number of phonological differences between two occurrences of the same word produced during the same recording changed from an average value of 0.85 at age 1;08 to 0.16 at age 2;05. The quality of the child's language improved dramatically, from many errors and phonological variations to very few errors and variations. However, during this time, the nature of the variations did not change. The number of confusions between consonants or between vowels were still of the same magnitude (15% for consonants and 39% for vowels). The only process that tended to disappear was deletion of syllables. During the same time, a large variety of phonological processes was found in all recordings with no specific trend, neither in a single recording nor during development.These results tend to show that phonological processes and rules are not a reliable descriptive or explanatory feature at the phoneme level in young children. Syllabic level proves to be more reliable. Since phoneme level rules and processes appear at a later age when children's phonology is very advanced, theses rules and processes could be an end product of development instead of innate or precocious characteristics of the language system. In particular, phonological rules and processes used by children with SLI could be a product of phonological remediatio