Does age reflect language mastery? Effect of performance measures in the analysis of phonological data

Abstract

This article examines two types of data organization criteria for intersubject comparison in phonological acquisition: Age Group, which is widely applied for intersubject comparison, and Performance in the Task, which compares subjetcs´ performance taking into account the percentage of answers in accordance with the adult production. We argue that a criterion for performance must take into account the performance in the phenomena analysed, since the linguistic development is not homogeneous. We compare here the results obtained by applying both criteria in the analysis of the voicing of alveolar fricatives in coda and the syllabic attack branching. It is shown that Performance in the Task promotes greater consistency than the Age Group in the organization of groups, both neutralizing individual differences observed in children’s linguistic development, and revealing congruent patterns in the use of repair strategies. With these results, we suggest that Performance in the Task is more effective than chronological measures for the organization, analysis and interpretation of data in language acquisition studies.