Abstract

6 /Researches in LinguisticsAn Acoustic Study of Children’s Phoneme Substitution Errors A. Karimi Moghaddam Arani University of Birjand J. Faroughi Hendevalan University of Birjand J. Sadri University of Birjand Abstract This paper deals with the phoneme substitution errors in children’s speech. The errors are felt by an adult listener as the replacement of one or more component sounds of a word by a different sound or sounds. The acoustic features of substitutive phonemes articulated by 19 girls and 18 boys of 2 to 7 years old within an acoustic space were analyzed and categorized using Praat spectrograph. The analysis of spectrographs and waveforms, the comparison of digital voice diagrams, and the calculation of percentage similarity of normalized Mel frequency Cepstral coefficients show that there is no reliable evidence for the concept of a substitution error in young children’s speech. In fact, some phonemic characteristics are neutralized in young children’s speech leading to audio errors in adult listeners’ cognition. The results are useful for providing an important metric of the child’s phonological development and for studying language learning theories as well as for curing children’s speech disorders. Key words: Articulatory error, Phoneme substitution error, Acoustic features, Child speech, Neutralization