The Voiced-voiceless Distinction in Four-year-old Children

Learning to speak is a more complex task than just discovering the articulatory movements required for the production of speech segments. Most children learn to recognize and produce the sounds of their language community quite early and grow gradually towards the complex patterns of adult phonology. In general, phonological theories present extensive descriptions about sound structures in many languages and studies on phonological development are going to be related more and more to the adult phonological characteristics. Data of child language offer a certain accessibility to sound structures and the acquisition process in the child can often be recognized as a basis for related empirical studies, such as phonetics. The technical description of speech sounds at a segmentalleve1 can provide detailed information about: the developing language system in terms ofphonemic distinctions the developing articulatory skills and knowledge about speech production