A syllable-based approach to whole-word phonology

This paper presents the Correct Syllables and Consonants (CSC) measure of whole-word phonology. The CSC refines Ingram's Phonological Mean Length of Utterance (PMLU) by adding a syllable component and simplifying the PMLU scoring procedure for consonants. Like PMLU, CSC provides a preliminary assessment of a child's phonology based on the observation that children are word oriented. The syllable component in CSC captures a prosodic component of whole-word phonology thereby rationalising the scoring procedure for syllabic consonants. The syllable component also links the CSC to broader measures of grammatical development. We demonstrate the CSC procedure in analysing language samples from a typically developing child and a child with phonological impairment. We validate the CSC measure by examining its correlation with PMLU in speech samples of two-year-old typically developing children acquiring six languages. The high correlation of CSC with PMLU establishes the cross-linguistic validity of CSC as a measure of whole-word phonology.