자발화에 나타난 형태소 유형에 따른 3-4세 아동의 치경마찰음 오류

Abstract

Korean alveolar fricatives are late-developing speech sounds. Most previous research on phonemes used individual words or pseudo words to produce sounds, but word-level phonological analysis does not always reflect a child’s practical articulation ability. Also, there has been limited research on articulation development looking at speech production by grammatical morphemes despite its importance in Korean language. Therefore, this research examines the articulation development and phonological patterns of the /s/ phoneme in terms of morphological types produced in children’s spontaneous conversational speech. The subjects were twenty-two typically developing 3- and 4-year-old Koreans. All children showed normal levels in three screening tests: hearing, vocabulary, and articulation. Spontaneous conversational samples were recorded at the children’s homes. The results are as follows. The error rates decreased with increasing age in all morphological contexts. Also, error percentages within an age group were significantly lower in lexical morphemes than in grammatical morphemes. The stopping of fricative sounds was the main error pattern in all morphological contexts and reduced as age increased. This research shows that articulation performance can differ significantly by morphological contexts. The present study provides data that can be used to identify the difficult context for articulatory evaluation and therapy of alveolar fricative sounds.