Underlying representations in children's speech

Includes bibliographical references.Knowledge of a child's underlying phonemic categories would be extremely helpful when working with children with speech-language impairments. Morris (1999) analyzed the speech productions and perceptions of 15 preschool children and grouped them based on their performance on the production and perception tasks. Three groups emerged. The current study reports on acoustic analysis of 8 children's productions of lsi and lei. The concept that was expanded upon was that children listen differently to sounds than adults (Nittrouer, Studdert-Kennedy, McGowan, 1989). If the specific acoustic characteristic that children weight so heavily can be determined, that characteristic can be found in the child's productions and thereby help to classify how they perceive different sounds. After gathering acoustic information three groups emerged similarly to the Morris (1999) study. An acoustic pattern was found that-is significant enough to have reason to believe that a procedure can be developed so that clinicians can record a child's speech, analyze it and know what the child's underlying phonemic categories are. Ifthis procedure can be validated clinicians will be able to differentially diagnose children easier, therapy will be more directed and more results will be produced.B.S. (Bachelor of Science