Revisiting Consonant Acquisition in Typically Developing Chinese-Speaking Children With Insights Into a Multiword Data Set of Hearing and Deaf/Hard of Hearing Children

PURPOSE: This study aimed to advance the understanding of consonant acquisition with quantitative and qualitative evidence from various groups of Chinese-speaking children. Normative patterns of phonological development of consonants were affirmed by utilizing phoneme transcription and perceptual judgment of a single-word normative data set, followed by analyses of comparable characteristics of a multiword data set of hearing and deaf/hard of hearing children. METHOD: The single-word normative data set comprised 798 typically developing Chinese-speaking children, whereas the multiword data set consisted of 79 normal hearing and 45 deaf/hard of hearing children. The percentage of consonants correct (PCC) was derived from phonemes transcribed by automatic alignment and human verification. Perceptual acceptability/intelligibility ratings include the percentage of correctly produced words (AccWord) in the normative data set and the intelligibility scores (IntScore) in the multiword data set. Distribution and correlation of PCC and AccWord/IntScore, as well as consonant error patterns, were examined and compared. RESULTS: Developmental patterns and phonological aspects of consonant acquisition in Chinese-speaking children were thoroughly reported. PCC was significantly correlated with AccWord/IntScore across all subject groups in both single-word and multiword data sets. This finding suggested that PCC can indicate speech performance above the phoneme level. In all subject groups, stopping errors occurred more frequently than frication, the accuracy rates of retroflex sounds were low, and there was a mixed use of /n, l, ʐ/. CONCLUSIONS: The current study featured developmental growth curves, error analysis, and possible clinical applications of a wordlist-based normative data set as reference standards. The fact that PCC is correlated with acceptability/intelligibility ratings across data sets and subject groups supports its efficacy as a quantitative indicator of child speech assessment.