Phonological Correlates of Middle-Ear Involvement in Speech-Delayed Children

The purpose of this note is to illustrate the potential contribution of phonological analysis to the study of the origins of developmental phonological disorders (delayed speech). Speech samples from two clinical populations of children with delayed speech were inspected. Within each group, children were subdivided on the basis of case records data on their histories of middle-ear involvement. In both clinical samples, children with positive histories of middle-ear involvement had statistically higher frequencies of occurrence of two sound change categories. Several analyses of one of the sound change categories were undertaken to determine whether these errors could be related to current deficits in underlying forms, to phonetic output constraints, or to perceptual-acoustic characteristics of the sounds involved.