Relationship between early pronunciation processes and later pronunciation skill

Two boys who exhibited different early phonological processes for the maintenance of syllables in polysyllabic words were studied at two subsequent times during the phonology development period. At Time 1 (mean age 1:10) one child used assimilation and reduplication, while the other used glottal and glide replacement. At Time 2 (mean age 3:8) and Time 3 (mean age 6:0) the children maintained differences in types and frequencies of process use. The child using glottal and glide replacement lagged somewhat behind the other regarding the rate of process dissolution, especially for those processes affecting affricates and clusters. The longitudinal data suggest that early processes applied to polysyllabic words may be predictive of later pronunciation skill for the production of continuous speech.