The rapid development of language that occurs in childhood is unparalleled. In their second year, children start learning how to produce onset consonant clusters. It has been proposed that children...Show moreThe rapid development of language that occurs in childhood is unparalleled. In their second year, children start learning how to produce onset consonant clusters. It has been proposed that children’s deviant cluster productions may be due to an incomplete underlying representation. The present study investigates this proposition by adapting the study done by Baese-Berk and Goldrick (2009) and employing a picture-naming paradigm with two conditions: a Minimal Pair condition wherein the critical difference between the two labels is the onset consonant cluster versus a singleton identical onset consonant and a Random Pair condition in which the target cluster word is paired with a completely different label. It was expected that if children possessed a specified underlying representation of onset clusters, there would be a notable difference in their attempts to produce the onset cluster between experimental conditions. Results from the 8 participants show that the Minimal Pair condition triggered a small increase in complete cluster production, thereby revealing that the representation of minimal pair cluster and non-cluster words are underlyingly different. This supports the claim that 2-year-old Dutch children possess an underlying representation of onset consonant clusters. Hence, children’s deviant production of clusters must be due to problems later in the speech production mechanism.Show less
This research attempts to investigate the planning process of an utterance. Two experiments have been conducted one with an online speech production task and one with a reading aloud production...Show moreThis research attempts to investigate the planning process of an utterance. Two experiments have been conducted one with an online speech production task and one with a reading aloud production task. The first produced word from the utterances is analysed to give an answer of the research question: how to plan an utterance during online vs reading-aloud speech production? It turned out that at syntactic planning the phrase for both experiments is the preferred unit of planning. Speech onset latencies and initial F0 peaks form evidence for this planning process. Within the first phonological word of the utterances no main effect was found for onset latencies in the reading- aloud task, while this was found in the online speech production task. Furthermore, no main effect was found for the initial F0 peaks in the online speech production task, while this was found for the reading- aloud task. Thus, the planning at phonological level seems to be different for both speech productions tasks.Show less
