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A Clinical Approach to the Assessment of Selected Three-Year-Old Pupils’ Renditions

Sound perception is pivotal to language acquisition and usage, and it is the bedrock for the display of linguistic knowledge in every individual. However, misperception of sounds and sound production anomalies can be language-based or cognitive oriented. The aim of this study was to assess the utterances of selected three-year-old pupils from a clinical perspective. The study basically adopts a survey research approach. Using the purposive sampling technique and the participatory observation method, twenty utterances of kindergarten pupils were recorded, transcribed and analysed both perceptually and acoustically. This study adapted a blend of the clinical phonological and clinical psycholinguistic approaches for the analysis of the selected pupils’ utterances. The results of the assessment were that even though speech disturbance characterise the language of the pupils, gender difference plays a role in cognitive and linguistic development. The female pupils are found to be less deficient than their male counterparts as their word-realisations are more appropriate and correspond more with the superstrate transcriptions. Also, in spite of the differences in the cognitive abilities of the pupils, they unconsciously adopt simplification procedures to cover up their speech deficiencies. It has been recommended that teachers have a key role to play to facilitate learning by both genders of learners in the classroom by varying their teaching methods and selecting instructional materials carefully.