Effect of task demands on phonological acquisition : the acquisition of phonemes in French speaking children aged 30 to 53 months in four different contexts.

When children first begin to produce the phonemes of their language, their productions are characterized by a high degree of variability (e.g., Ferguson & Farwell, 1975) and are influenced by task demands (Khami, Catts, & Davis, 1984). As children’s phonological representations become more defined, their productions become more stable and less influenced by the task demands. Despite the clinical significance of phonological variability, there exists no normative data that can be used to objectively describe this variability in French. The goal of the present study was to describe variability and consistency among French-speaking children between the ages of 30 and 53 months, according to task demands. A total of 153 children participated in the present study and were equally distributed in four groups (aged 30-35, 36-41, 42-47, and 48-53 months). We created a picture identification task with 65 target words, which contained the consonants of French in word initial, medial and final position. The children were asked to produce these words in four different contexts : 1) picture naming ; 2) word repetition ; 3) sentence repetition ; 4) spontaneous language. Two measures of consistency were used. (1) A consonant level analysis that investigated the stability of phonological accuracy. (2) A word level analysis that investigated the consistency of productions across the four tasks. We predict that younger children will be more influenced by changes in task complexity than older children.