Year: 2024 | Month: April | Volume: 14 | Issue: 4 | Pages: 78-84
DOI: https://doi.org/10.52403/ijhsr.20240413
Sentence Imitation Task to Understand Phonological Representations in Preschool Children
Ranjitha R1, N Sreedevi2
1PhD Research Scholar, All India Institute of Speech and Hearing, Mysore, India
2Department of Speech Sciences, All India Institute of Speech and Hearing, Mysore, India
Corresponding Author: Ranjitha R
ABSTRACT
Background: The term phonological representation is widely used to describe the storage of phonological information about words in long-term memory (Sutherland & Gillon, 2005). The organization of sounds within a word plays an important role, along with the sounds included in defining the structure of a word (Valleman, 2002). Linguistic abilities of children with language impairment, as well as typically developing children, can be found using sentence imitation tasks (Botting & Faragher, 2001, Ebert, 2014; Priya, 2017)
Method: 240 typically developing Malayalam speaking children in the age range of 3-5 years were selected from several preschools in Kerala. They were further subdivided into four age groups separated by six months (≥3;0-≤3;6; 3;6-≤4;0; 4;0-≤4;6 and 4;6-≤5;0years). There were 60 participants in each group (30 males and 30 females). The participants were administered, a sentence imitation test in Malayalam, developed and validated by the authors. 20 sentences in Malayalam with a mean length of utterance ranging from 4 to 7 morphemes were used as target sentences.
Results: Results revealed a significant effect of age on the total scores obtained on syllable shapes and word shapes. Except for bisyllables, the total number of words produced by the participants increased with age. Likewise, the total number of syllables and the number of syllable shapes produced increased with age, except for Vowels and Vowel Consonants.
Conclusion: Poorly developed phonological representations make it difficult for young children to imitate word or syllable shapes in sentences. Compared to spontaneous speech tasks, administering sentence imitation tasks requires lesser time and hence can be included in the assessment of speech sound disorders in young children. Hence, phonotactics in sentence imitation has an important role in understanding phonological representations in young children. This study aimed to investigate the phonological representations in Malayalam-speaking preschool children aged 3.6 to 5.0 years through a sentence imitation task.
Key words: Word shapes, syllable shapes, sentence imitation, phonotactics, phonological representations