Our findings suggest that protracted development of weak-strong stress production reflects physiological constraints on producing short articulatory durations and rising intensity contours. Findings validate treatment that is centered on strong-weak stress production for children ≥ 3 years with dysprosody. Although intervention for the production of weak-strong words may be initiated before age 7 years, reference to normative acoustic data is preferable to relying on perceptual judgments of accuracy.

Children’s acquisition of adult-like speech production has fascinated speech-language pathologists for over a century, and data gained from associated research have informed every aspect of speech-language pathology practice. The acquisition of the consonant cluster has received little attention during this time, even though the consonant cluster is a common feature of speech, its acquisition is one of the most protracted of all aspects of children’s speech development, and the production of consonant clusters is one of the most common difficulties for children with speech impairment. This paper reviews the literature from the past 70 years to describe children’s normal acquisition of consonant clusters. Articulatory, phonological, linguistic, and acoustic approaches to the development of consonant clusters are reviewed. Data from English are supplemented with examples from other languages. Consideration of the information on consonant cluster development revealed 10 aspects of normal development that can be used in speech-language pathologists’ assessment and analysis of children’s speech.

This study was conducted to establish normative nasalance values for Swedish speaking children as measured with the Nasometer(trade mark) II, and to investigate differences due to regional dialect, gender, and age. Two hundred and twenty healthy children aged 4-5, 6-7, and 9-11 years were included. Group mean nasalance scores for four speech stimuli were calculated and compared. There were no significant differences due to dialect or gender for children in the study. For age there was a significant difference on nasal sentences between the youngest group of children and the other two groups, age 4-5 vs age 6-7 (t = -2.844, p = .006) and for age 4-5 vs age 9-11 (t = -2.888, p = .005). The results from this study have both clinical significance for Swedish SLPs working with resonance disorders, and theoretical significance for linguists studying features of dialects and languages.

The results of untrained listeners' ratings in this study in the main confirm the ratings of speech and language pathologists and show that cleft palate speech disorders may have an impact in the everyday life of the speaker.

The Nasometer might be useful for the SLP with limited experience in assessing resonance disorders in differentiating between hyper- and hyponasality. With listener reliability for ratings of hypernasality still being an issue, the use of a nasalance score as a complement to the perceptual evaluation will also aid the expert SLP. It will give an alternative way of quantifying speech resonance and might help in especially hard to judge cases.