Effects of training on fricative identification in toddlers

Researchers who have attempted to relate phonemic identification in young children to their productive performance have met with little success. The failure to do so may reflect the difficulty of the task and uncontrolled stimulus familiarity. Fricative perception was investigated in toddlers using repeated tests to control for these factors. Each subject was tested on two contrasts, one the child produced distinctly in an imitation task and one the child produced as similar syllables. The final perceptual results were well matched to productive distinctiveness. Performance on the identification task over time is considered in terms of the relation between perception and production, the methodology, and competition at the phonological level in the learning of new words.