Intra-word inconsistency in apraxic Hebrew-speaking children.

Intra-word inconsistency in a child is perceived as an indicator of speech impairment. Because the speech of typically developing children is highly variable, the extent and nature of the inconsistency must be defined when used as a diagnostic marker of speech impairment (McLeod, S., & Hewett, S. R. (2008). Variability in the production of words containing consonant clusters by typical 2- and 3-year-old children. Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica, 60(4), 163-172). In this paper, we study inconsistency with reference to the prosodic hierarchy (McCarthy, J. J., & Prince, A. S. (1996). Prosodic morphology 1986. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts. Retrieved April 15, 2010, from http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/pub/papers/pm86all.pdf), suggesting a new way to describe this phenomenon in childhood apraxia of speech (CAS). The prosodic hierarchy has been used in recent years to demonstrate the phonological development of typical and atypical populations. Sixteen children diagnosed with CAS (average age 3;11) participated in the study. The data, collected from each child in the course of eight weekly meetings, are drawn from naming single words. The results indicate that inconsistency is dominant for two prosodic levels, the segmental and the syllabic, while the prosodic word level was largely preserved.