This study investigated the possibility that similar speech error patterns in children may arise from different patterns of underlying speech processing difficulties. Four Greek children (aged 4;7–5;6 years) with similar speech output difficulties were assessed with a range of experimental tasks with phonologically matched items in order to profile a selection of the consonants and clusters, with which they experienced production difficulties. To check that the skills and words tested were typically acquired by this age, the tasks were also conducted on a control group of five typically developing children (aged 4;4–5;11 years). Tasks included nonword auditory discrimination, mispronunciation detection, naming, real word repetition and nonword repetition. For the experimental group, comparison of performance across tasks for each consonant or cluster identified different loci of difficulty across children. The findings suggest that this kind of profiling could reveal underlying speech processing difficulties, leading to implications for intervention.

This is a repository copy of Phonology, morphology and speech processing development in Greek-speaking children.

Intervention with children with speech and language difficulties has been proven beneficial compared with no treatment yet, knowing what type of intervention to provide remains a challenge. Studies of English-speaking children indicate that intervention targeting the production of morphological targets may have a positive effect on phonological aspects and vice versa. However, studies have not reported on generalization effects to untreated morphemes and little is yet known about morphological intervention in the context of a highly inflected language. The purpose of the current intervention case study was to investigate the effect of intervention in relation to phonological and morphological targets in Greek, a language characterized by complex inflectional

According to the most recent formulation of Relativized Minimality, grammatical features are distinguished between those that are syntactically active and those that are not. Under this view, only the first play a role in the computation of locality. Furthermore, whether a certain feature is +/− syntactically active is determined by language-specific factors. Gender is one of the grammatical features that has been argued to have different values in Hebrew vs. Italian, and as a result, to play a role only in Hebrew-speaking children’s comprehension of relative clauses, in terms of intervention effects. Amidst this backdrop, this paper focuses on gender and case, and examines whether or not they have similar effects in the comprehension of relative clauses by Greek-speaking children. Greek differs from Hebrew in that gender does not qualify as a syntactically active feature, hence, the prediction is that it should behave like case, which does not qualify as syntactically active either. The paper presents results from a novel study showing that, indeed, neither gender nor case are responsible for intervention effects in the comprehension of relative clauses by Greek-speaking children, although both features are robustly expressed in Greek nominal morphology.

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