engleski

Development of phonological knowledge within phonological representation

Cognitive phonologists tend to describe the concept of phoneme theoretically, without addressing its content. However, scholars investigating development of reading skills discuss phonological representation - the construct containing various types of knowledge required for speech development. According to Sutherland (2006), phonological representation includes acoustic information containing phonemic and phonetic elements. Furthermore, detailed phonological representations also contain visual information such as lip movements. The content of phonological representations is also discussed by laboratory phonologists (Munson et al. 2005). They call it phonological knowledge and suggest the following structure: perceptual and articulatory representations, higher-order phonological knowledge and socioindexical information. The representations are interconnected and connected to lexical and semantic representations. However, the phonological knowledge, does not comprise the role of anatomical development in phonetic knowledge, and higher-order phonological knowledge does not include distinctive function of the phoneme. Rvachew and Bernhardt (2010) propose a model that is primarily focused on the phonological knowledge, but does not address the relationship between phonological, lexical and semantic representations. Their model came as a result of applying dynamic systems theory in clinical practice, and they claim that phonological representations consist of various types of knowledge interconnected and related according to the principles of the theory in question. The model of phoneme proposed here assumes that speech development relies on the following: the growth of lexicon, maturation of articulators (anatomical and motor development), and cognitive development evident in the skills pertaining to phonological processing. In addition to providing a detailed description of the model, the paper presents the results of a study related to the model we are proposing. The study included a sample of 600 (300 female and 300 male) participants aged 3-7, who were at different stages of speech development of the sound that was the focus of our interest: /r/. In terms of the order of speech sounds development in Croatian, the /r/ sound is last to develop. The aim of the study was to investigate development of phonological knowledge by establishing the interrelationships among the following: a) spontaneous speech production of the target sound, b) production based on repetition (which tends to occur approximately six months before the spontaneous production due to stimulability), c) perception of the target sound, and d) phoneme awareness of the target sound. The central finding of the study was that the participants aged 3-4, who have not yet developed the spontaneous speech production of the target sound, are able to perceptually differentiate the sound if they can repeat the sound, which suggests development of new phonological knowledge, first observable in their speech perception.

phoneme ; phonological representation ; phonological knowledge

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