Consonant Cluster Acquisition in Toddlers: An Explorative Study

The acquisition of consonant clusters is considered as one of the final stages of speech development in typically developing children. Nonetheless, the phonological development in children is now more advanced compared to the previously established norms. The current study aimed to determine how consonantal clusters, in particular non-geminate clusters, emerged throughout the early phases of phonological acquisition and to understand the positional variations in the cluster acquisition. The study involved 40 Malayalam speaking children aged between two to three years, divided into four groups with an age interval of 3 months. These children were administered 30 non-geminate consonant clusters from the Malayalam Articulation Test – Revised. Positional effect of the cluster acquisition was examined. In addition, the type of articulatory errors on consonant production were also determined. Findings from the present study revealed that children achieve the mastery of many consonant clusters by two to three years of age. Positional effect of cluster acquisition revealed medial clusters were acquired earlier than initial clusters. Cluster reduction was the dominant cluster error type, decreasing with age. Thus, compared with the previous established norms, the current findings demonstrate a much earlier acquisition of nongeminate clusters in Malayalam. The revised norms for cluster acquisition proposed from the findings of this study could benefit Speech-Language Pathologists to conduct age-appropriate assessment and treatment of speech sound disorders.