Effect of Similarity of Sound Substitutions on Retention

Abstract

Phonetic similarity of the sound to be learned and the sound which is substituted may be an important variable governing phonological acquisition. The effect of phonetic similarity was measured in a recall test involving two retention intervals—three minutes and seven days. Accordingly, the /sn/ cluster appearing in the word snow was selected as the sound for which children were to make substitutions. English and non-English clusters varying in phonetic similarity to /sn/ were selected to replace /sn/. The results indicated that phonetic similarity influenced the retention of English and non-English clusters; recall showed the least decrement for those most similar to /sn/. Imitation was tested by asking subjects to imitate the substituted cluster after the seven-day recall test. For all clusters, imitation was surprisingly stable after seven days, suggesting that “motor memory” for speech sounds is highly stable over long intervals of time.