Frozen phonology thawed: the analysis and remediation of a developmental disorder of real word phonology.

A 5-year-old boy presented with very deviant phonological production, as well as some delay in acquisition of vocabulary for comprehension. Investigations showed that, in contrast to his very limited phonological system in word production and naming, he was able to repeat a variety of non-words with reasonable accuracy using a variety of syllable structures. A period of therapy aimed at improving his phonological segmentation skills resulted in dramatic improvement in real word production to the same level that he showed with non-words. This improvement was specific to the domain of treatment--real word phonology--demonstrating that the effects were a result of the therapy regimen. The reasons for this dissociation between the phonology of real words and non-words are discussed. It is concluded that the child's pattern of performance is incompatible with theories which assume that a single phonological representation is used both for word recognition and for output. His deficit appears to lie in a failure to update the underlying phonological representations used to drive spoken output as his phonological abilities develop--his lexical phonology was 'frozen'.