Phonological development of Danish-speaking children: A normative cross-sectional study

Detailed knowledge about speech development in children acquiring different languages provides important information from a clinical and a theoretical perspective: First, it provides a baseline for the evaluation of whether a child shows typical, delayed or deviant speech development. Further, differences in speech development across languages can help to understand how the phonological systems of ambient languages affects children’s speech acquisition. To date, little is known about Danish. It was suggested, however, that the acquisition process might be slower for Danish-speaking children due to the “blurry” sound structure of Danish. The aim of the current study was, therefore, to investigate typical speech development in 443 Danish-speaking children, i.e. types and age of occurrence of children’s phonological processes as well as on the acquisition of phones and clusters. The results showed that Danish-speaking children, in contrast to the expectations, were not delayed but advanced compared to children acquiring other languages.