The word complexity measure (WCM) in early phonological development: A longitudinal study from birth to three years old

The word complexity measure (WCM) in early phonological development: A longitudinal study from birth to three years old Li-mei Chen1 and Yi-Hsiang Liu2 Abstract Word Complexity Measure (WCM, Stoel-Gammon, 2010) is a system of phonological assessment for children’s speech productions, a method that focuses on the complexity rather than accuracy. With its flexible parameter program, the assessment can be adjusted to the phonological properties of different languages. In the current study, the WCM was used to assess speech production of three Mandarin-learning children from birth to three years old. In addition to the original parameters in Stoel-Gammon (2010), the Chinese version of WCM made some adjustments, including incorporating productions of fricatives, affricates, /ʐ/, /y/, and the late acquired vowels and consonants, to examine the complexity of speech productions. Major findings in the developmental changes of the first 3 years are: 1) the complexity of the intelligible words increased, with individual differences in the stability of changes; 2) the complexity of the unintelligible syllables also elaborated; 3) the percentage of simple words/syllables decreased in both intelligible and unintelligible productions. Keywords: Production complexity, Mandarin-learning children, Phonological development, Word complexity measure 1. Introduction Word Complexity Measure (WCM, Stoel-Gammon, 2010) is a measurement for developmental phonology and disorder. WCM focuses on the complexity and is based on point-giving process. Comparing with Percentage of Consonant Correct (PCC, Shriberg & Kwiatkowski, 1982) and the measurement of whole-word productions (Ingram, 2002), WCM demonstrates advantages in describing the development of speech production because the parameter in WCM was designed to mirror the properties of child phonology. The PCC also calculates points in children’s speech for measuring intelligibility. However, in PCC only the accurate speech sounds are given points in the process, and those unintelligible utterances are not scored because they are not real words. Namely, the PCC examines and quantifies the accuracy of the sounds that is articulated correctly. However, children produce not only the intelligible words but many non-word sounds, especially in the early ages. By means of the WCM, those unintelligible utterances can also be scored and quantified. Children with 1,2 Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Cheng Kung University The 2015 Conference on Computational Linguistics and Speech Processing ROCLING 2015, pp. 233-247  The Association for Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing 233 small vocabulary can also be inspected. For example, children with language disorders can also be examined with this measurement. This may provide a useful tool for clinical assessment. Moreover, WCM provides phonological development scales with which phonological changes can be tracked. In addition, children’s forms can be compared with target forms with WCM measures. Namely, both independent and relational analysis can be done with WCM. The whole-word production (Ingram, 2002) proposed four measures to estimate speech production of children: 1) the phonological mean length of utterance (PMLU); 2) the proportion of whole-word proximity; 3) the proportion of whole-word correctness; 4) the proportion of whole-word variability. The core lies in the PMLU, which gives points to each word based on two factors: …

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