Realization of the Phonemic-Syllabic Structure of Words in the Speech of Children with Intellectual Disability

Problems in the realization of the phonemic structure of the word (the composition and arrangements of phonemes) examined in relation to the syllabic structure of the word are presented in this article based on the example of the phenomena in the articulation of four children with moderate intellectual disability, aged 8–11 (two with cerebral palsy (CP) and two with Down syndrome). All children were diagnosed with oligophasia, three of them with dysglossia co-occurring with dysphagia, and the CP children – with dysarthria as well. In the articulation of the studied children there were paradigmatic disorders (in the form of distortion and substitution of phonemes) accompanied by syntagmatic disorders: changes in the word structure consisting in quantitative distortions (first of all reductions of the word structure resulting from the reduction of single phonemes and phoneme groups, the most frequent of the recorded phenomena being the simplification of consonant groups) and in qualitative distortions (mainly in the form of phoneme assimilation); a relatively large group consisted of words whose structure was considerably transformed as a result of the so-called combined changes.