The following article has just been published as an early online article.
Másdóttir, T., McLeod, S., & Crowe, K. (2021). Icelandic children's acquisition of consonants and consonant clusters. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1044/2021_JSLHR-20-00463
Here is the abstract:
Purpose. This study investigated Icelandic-speaking children’s acquisition of singleton consonants and consonant clusters.
Method. Participants were 437 typically-developing children aged 2;6 to 7;11 acquiring Icelandic as their first language. Single-word speech samples of the 47 single consonants and 45 consonant clusters were collected using Málhljóðapróf ÞM [ÞM's Test of Speech Sound Disorders].
Results. Percentage of consonants correct for children aged 2;6-2;11 was 73.12 (SD = 13.33) and increased to 98.55 (SD = 3.24) for children aged 7;0-7;11. Overall, singleton consonants were more likely to be accurate than consonant clusters. The earliest consonants to be acquired were /m, n, p, t, j, h/ in word-initial position and /f, l/ within words. The last consonants to be acquired were /x, r, r̥, s, θ, n̥/, and consonant clusters in word-initial /sv-, stl-, str-, skr-, θr-/, within-word /-ðr-, -tl-/, and word-final /-kl̥, -xt/ contexts. Within-word phonemes were more often accurate than those in word-initial position, with word-final position the least accurate. Accuracy of production was significantly related to increasing age, but not sex.
Conclusion. This is the first comprehensive study of consonants and consonant cluster acquisition by typically developing Icelandic-speaking children. The findings align with trends for other Germanic languages; however, there are notable language-specific differences of clinical importance.
This research has been the result of a long-term collaboration with Thora
Másdóttir (Þóra Másdóttir) and Kate Crowe that began with my visit to
Iceland in 2014 https://speakingmylanguages.blogspot.com/2014/06/icelandic-association-of-speech-and.html
