A Study Related to the Phonological Processes and Linguistic Behaviour of a Sinhala Speaking Child

Abstract

This research mainly focuses on finding and analysing the phonological simplifications that occur in the language development process of a Sinhala speaking child. It could be detected that phonological development is a universal process through which a child learns to organize sounds into an actual language during the stages of growth. As they learn to talk, different sound errors occur in their speech due to the inability of coordinating their lips, tongue, teeth, palate and jaw to make clear utterances. Throughout the history, many linguists have adopted different theories regarding this field. According to those research studies different phonological processes occur in the linguistic behaviour of a child such as assimilation, deletion, consonant clusters, switching of sounds etc. Accordingly, the major objective of this research is to detect the validity and applicability of those concepts for Sinhala speaking children, and to identify different types of phonological simplifications that occur in the linguistic behaviour of a Three-year-old child, who uses Sinhala as the first language.