The pronunciation of stops in consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words: a comparison between normal and speech-disordered preschool children.

A study was made of the pronunciation of stop consonants in CVC words by three groups of preschool children. The two groups of normal children had insignificant problems, but the speech-disordered group had a wide range of errors. Errors in initial position differed from errors in final position. Voicing errors occurred most frequently in initial position, and glottal stop realizations in final position. The incidence of consonant harmony was unexpectedly low, accounting for few errors, and there was no evidence of the "fronting strategy" (Ingram, 1974) in the speech-disordered children.