| Summary: | There is currently little knowledge about the development of morphology in relation to phonology and the speech processing system (speech input, speech output, and lexical representations). In this thesis a psycholinguistic approach was used to investigate the development of phonological and morphological skills in Greek speaking preschool age children. The central hypothesis is that the successful acquisition of phonological and morphological characteristics of a spoken language depends on the accuracy and efficiency of speech processing skills. This has been explored through a longitudinal normative study of speech and language development and two intervention single case studies of children with speech difficulties. Two groups of typically developing children aged 3;0-3;5 and 4;6-5;0 years respectively were assessed longitudinally at three assessment points six months apart. At each point published language assessments and experimental tasks were used. A number of morphological phenomena e.g. tense, possessive pronouns, irregular plural, were taken as the basis for experimental stimuli that reflected the morphological and phonological properties of interest. These stimuli were used in tasks of speech perception and word and nonword repetition, items being matched across tasks. The two intervention studies focused on the impact of training the production of phonological targets on the accuracy of morphological productions, and vice versa, as well as the effect of this training on broader speech and language processing skills. Significant processing similarities were found between phonological and morphological items, as were relationships between the two domains. Both intervention case studies indicated that as a result of targeting the accurate production of morphemes, generalization to the accurate production of phonological characteristics may occur; one case also supported the reverse effect. Overall, these results suggest that the morphological characteristics of spoken language are an integral part of lexical representations, a finding which has interesting implications for speech and language therapy practice.
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