What is in the “I” of the beholder: modeling the processing of consonant addition in a child’s pronoun

Abstract Phonological processing in child developmental speech has been a major topic of research offering insights into intervention methods for child disordered speech. The present paper investigates the processing of consonant addition to the English personal pronoun I, a monosyllable comprising the diphthong //. This phonological phenomenon has not been studied in the literature in monolingual or bilingual speech. Here, a child’s speech is elicited longitudinally from age 2;9 to 3;9 and additions to I are examined in terms of the phonological processes of anticipation and perseveration. Results reveal (i) decreasing additions with age, (ii) larger processing distance in perseveration than in anticipation between triggering consonant and added I, (iii) addition dominance of the sonorants n, l and of the voiceless alveolar plosive t, matching their target frequencies in the child’s speech, (iv) no correlation between probability of consonant addition occurrence and syllabic processing distance, and (v) strong and statistically significant correlation between the mean and standard deviation of processing distance across the child’s ages, meaning that one or the other can be used in practice instead of both. These findings offer insights into speech error processing with applications to intervention techniques in children with speech difficulties.