A Longitudinal Study of the Acquisition of Pahari Consonants by a School aged speech-delayed child from age 4-10 to 5-8

Abstract

The key objective of this study is to track the acquisition of Pahari consonants by a speech-delayed child over 10 months from his age 4-10 to 5-8. The child based in rural Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), past the age of early speech-language assessment as well as intervention, and presented with severe speech delay is recruited in this study at the age of 4-10. His spontaneous speech data, audio-recorded at the ages of 4-10, 5-3 and 5-8, is analyzed under the Production Accuracy Analysis adapted from Alqattan (2015). The results reveal that the child follows a normal but severely delayed course of speech development in terms of consonant acquisition. His early phonemic repertoire consist largely of stops and nasals, while he is found most deficient in the coronal consonants. The insights from this study might be of interest to the field of speech-language pathology to better serve the children speaking the lesser-known Pahari language. To prevent speech delay from persisting into the school age, early intervention is recommended.