Perceptual and perceptual-motor characteristics of phonemic development.

Children between 3 and 5 years of age were examined with regard to their abilities in recognizing differences between certain speech sounds and their performance in imitating and spontaneously generating the same sounds in familiar words. Analysis of error patterns shows the least number of errors for the recognition task and greatest number for the spontaneous production task, with imitation holding the intermediate position (R less than I less than P). Results are related to a theory of phonemic development in children.