At what age does stopping usually get eliminated in children?

Stopping, a phonological process in which a fricative sound is replaced with a stop consonant, is commonly observed in young children's speech development. This process typically begins to diminish around the age of 3 years. Research indicates that many children begin to master the production of fricatives and related sounds within this timeframe, leading to a decrease in the occurrence of stopping. By the age of 4, most children have largely eliminated this phonological pattern, indicating that the speech development process is quite dynamic during this period. Therefore, 3 years is often seen as the age by which stopping is usually eliminated from a child’s speech repertoire, aligning with standard developmental milestones in speech sound acquisition.