Children’s Speech Inaccuracies and Developmental Change: An Elicited Production Study in 5- to 13-year-old Japanese Children

Abstract

This study investigated the developmental changes in Japanese children’s speech inaccuracies through an elicited production task. The difficulty of segments, complexity of words in which the segments were embedded, and length of carrier sentences, were manipulated. The results revealed that inaccuracies occurred significantly more frequently in children aged 9 years and younger than in older children and adults. An increase in the number of syllables within a word and the length of the carrier sentences, but not in morae, increased the occurrence of inaccuracies. However, the difficulty of the segments showed a complex relationship with inaccurate speech.