The variability of speech due to dialects, age, gender, anatomical structures of the speech organs, phonological status, phonation and
resonance can be a barrier for automatic speech recognition. Especially in children and among speaker with communication, language
and speech difficulties speech is variable. In the project Cross-linguistic study of protracted phonological (speech) development in
children: Slovenian we have analyzed 54 preschool children and focused our research on epi-, pro- and epen-thesis. The most evident
for of process is epenthesis of schwa in consonant clusters and epithesis of a stop or a fricative before fricatives. The data show that
vocalic epenthesis frequently occurs in consonant clusters, especially in those clusters which require different manner of articulation,
or articulatory organ (or part of it) for example between obstruents and sonorants, between obstruents and between sonorants.
Consonantal epenthesis occurs in words with difficult phonemes, especially obstruents, before the velars, before sibilant, before
fricatives (adding affricates). An interesting addition is voiceless stop in front of the fricative at the beginning of words.
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