| dc.description.abstract | The main aim of this thesis is to investigate the production of consonant clusters with and without /s/ by TD Dutch children. Sub aims are to determine the kind of errors children make while realising consonant clusters, and whether clusters are more accurately produced in initial or finial position. Elicited productions of 55 TD Dutch children of 3-5 year old were analysed. Productions were elicited via a new Dutch Non-Word Repetition Task (NWRT), which was adapted from French (Dos Santos & Ferré, 2016). In addition, the Digit Span test and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PVVT) were administered to see if correlations were present between the different scores. As expected, no correlation between NWRT and Digit Span scores was found, which showed that the NWRT did not test phonological short term-memory as a main component. No correlation was found between NWRT and PVVT scores for most children, which was also expected. Results showed that children of 3 and 5 made insertion and cluster reduction errors most often, while 4 year old children made cluster reduction most often. In addition, most children produced consonant clusters in final position more accurately than in initial position. The main results of this study were not in line with previous literature and showed that children performed better on initial structures with /s/ compared to initial structures without /s/ and that initial consonant clusters with /s/ were acquired before consonant clusters without /s/. These results can be explained in terms of different structures and frequencies between the two cluster groups. Results also showed that final consonant clusters including /s/ were acquired before initial clusters without /s/, which cannot be explained by frequency. In addition, performance was higher on initial and final clusters with /s/ compared to medial structures. The first can be explained in terms of frequency, while the second cannot. More research is needed on this subject, to understand why and which different patterns occur between the performance on consonant clusters with and without /s/. This study has clinical implications, since a new order of acquisition was found for consonant clusters. | |
