Talk:Speech acquisition

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As stated by an article found in a 2010 issue of Language, Speech & Hearing Services in Schools “The study of speech acquisition looks at how children make sense of and use the speech sounds around them, both learning to articulate and acquiring the rules of adult phonology in their language.” (source 3) Language acquisition and speech acquisition differ because of the differences between language and speech. While both are closely related in the overall process of communication, speech is an oral expression that requires complex physiological coordination of respiration, phonation, resonation, and articulation. Speech and language can exist independently of each other. (source 5) Speech acquisition cannot be an indicator of retention of information because it focuses more on the motor skills and the ability to produce speech, not whether or not the speech being produced is information that was learned and retained. (source 2)

Speech Sound Acquisition: Speech sound development starts before we are born and continues on until around age seven or eight. Despite the language a child is learning, the beginning speech sounds (babbling) that are produced are all relatively similar. (source 1) However, studies have shown that the language environment typically influences the error patterns that are found in these early stages of speech. (source 3) When a child is about three years old they have almost entirely developed the English vowel system. Children who are monolingual English learners tend to master many sounds between the ages of four and five. (source 1)

Speech Sound Disorders: Speech sound disorders are found in individuals who have difficulty developing or producing speech sounds. The types of speech sound disorders are phonological, articulation, motor speech disorders, as well as apraxia of speech. Disorders of these types are typically found in children, and if left without intervention, can severely impact their lives as they grow older. (source 6)

Speech Rhythm: Speech rhythm focuses on timing and regularity of prominent speech units. Due to the fact that it varies depending on the language, it is a component that is often looked at when studying children who are growing up learning more than one language. There are two distinguished categories that fall under speech rhythm- syllable timed language and stress-timed language. English is considered to be a stress-timed language, while Spanish is the former of the two. Stress-timed language is said to have more equal intervals within the speech. In comparison, syllable-timed language shows more equality in the timing of the syllables. (source 4) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Orbaczea (talk • contribs) 02:45, 17 March 2014 (UTC)