Perception and production of the final /s-ts/ contrast in Dutch by misarticulating children.

This study investigates the specific relationship between speech perception and speech production by comparing 6- and 7-year-old children who misarticulated the final consonant cluster /-ts/ with three control groups. One control group of children misarticulated other phonemes than the specific /-ts/ cluster, another group of children had no articulation problems at all, and a third control group consisted of normally articulating adults. Perception was studied by assessing identification functions on a /moes/-to-/moets/ speech continuum in which the silence period had been manipulated. Production was analyzed by measuring the silence periods in productions of the Dutch word muts. The results show a clear hierarchical trend: The poorer the articulation proficiency of a group, the more variability there is in both production and perception. In perception, this variability is not restricted to the problematic /-ts/ cluster but includes the whole /-s/-to-/-ts/ contrast. Furthermore, it appears that a general as well as a specific relationship exists between perception and production and that the character of this relationship does not support the motor theory of speech perception.