Generalization During Speech Sound Discrimination Training

An experiment was conducted to determine whether training discrimination of a phoneme in one position in a context results in children responding to the phoneme when it is presented in other positions in contexts. Five subjects were trained to respond correctly to a phoneme in the initial, final and medial positions in a context in three progressive phases of training. At the conclusion of each training phase the remaining two positions were tested. Results showed that the subjects generalized from initial position training to the final position. The two positions were more likely to function as members of one class of stimuli, whereas the medial position functioned more nearly like a discrete and separate class of stimuli.