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Cross-linguistic studies on time reference in highly inflected languages have shown that tense inflection is particularly vulnerable in agrammatic speakers. According to the PAstDIscourseLInking Hy...

Phonological awareness is closely related to reading acquisition and it is often the focus of the therapy services provided by speech-language pathologists and special education teachers. In this study, we investigate whether sonority theory can account for the developmental patterns of phoneme awareness skills in Greek. To that end, 40 preschool and first grade children carried out an offline metaphonological task that involved the initial consonant deletion of two-consonant clusters. Overall, children's performance was in line with the sonority sequencing principle (SSP); consonant clusters that display a maximal rise in sonority were easier to manipulate compared to clusters with minimal sonority difference or SSP-violating clusters. Affricates generated the highest number of errors, a finding that strengthens the singleton status of /ts/ and /dz/ in Greek. Increased error rates were also found for /ps/, /pc/, /ks/, a fact attributed to both to their spelling and sonority characteristics. Conclusively, it is claimed that the developmental error patterns reported in this study can be used to inform appraisal and treatment protocols of phonological awareness in Greek, by organizing metaphonological tasks based on the presumed level of difficulty of the items tested and/or treated.

This brief article reflects on some pitfalls inherent in the learning and teaching of segmental phonetic transcription. We suggest that a gestural interpretation to disordered speech data, in conjunction with segmental phonetic transcription, can add valuable insight into patterns of disordered speech, and that a gestural orientation should form part of the understanding and interpretation of the process of transcribing and the use of transcripts. We illustrate our discussion with data from a case of moderately to severely unintelligible speech produced by a boy aged 5;9.