Consonant and Syllable Harmony in the Speech of Language-Disordered Children

The focus of this study was an examination of the functions served by consonant assimilation and reduplication in the speech of eight language-disordered children. The findings suggested that assimilation may have served the function of allowing the children to produce words in a manner enabling them to avoid difficult consonants, while reduplication may have served the function of allowing the children to produce multisyllabic words at a time when they were not yet able to handle the syllable structure of the adult forms of these words. The implications of these findings for lexical and speech sound training are discussed.