Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T17:21:38.648Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Phonological harmony as a processing problem*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Thomas Berg
Thomas Berg*
Affiliation:
University of Oldenburg
*
FB II, English Linguistics Department, University of Oldenburg, Ammerländer Heerstr. 114–18, 2900 Oldenburg, Germany.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This investigation focuses upon an outstanding aspect of child phonology – that of consonant harmony, relabelled ‘phonological harmony’ – and inquires whether representational or processing deficits are responsible for its occurrence. A detailed analysis of the oral output of one German-speaking girl (2;7.15–2;11) supports the contention that the Imperfect Processing Model fares much better in accounting for her harmony strategy than the Incomplete Representation Model. It is established that bilabial harmony is the only type of assimilation she has recourse to, and that this process is mainly used to cope with difficult sounds, although it also implicates consonants which do not pose a production problem. The difficult sounds are arguably not absent from the child's system because they can be uttered in some positions though not in others. The harmonizing tendency is interpreted within the interactive activation model of language production and is claimed to emanate from two particularities of her processing system. She has represented even the difficult elements as network nodes, but some connections between the segment and the feature level are ill developed. As a result, activation cannot spread smoothly between these levels and the relevant units cannot be made available for production. In addition, an excessive linkage strength has been built up among the node [bilabial] and all its associates at the segment level. This puts bilabial consonants into a state of hyperactivation and allows them even to intrude upon those segments which have been perfectly mastered. It is finally shown why these two mechanisms are very unlikely to become permanent features of the child's processing system.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , June 1992 , pp. 225 - 257
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

This article is dedicated, no wonder, to my daughter Melanie who has given me the pleasure of catching a glimpse into her phonological world (amongst other pleasures, of course). Special thanks are owed to Ulrich Schade for fruitful discussion of the issues raised here and to an anonymous reviewer for his/her critical comments on an earlier version. Further thanks go to Petra Krieg and Uwe Laubenstein for their technical assistance.

References

REFERENCES

Ackley, D. H., Hinton, G. E. & Sejnowski, T. J. (1985). A learning algorithm for Boltzmann machines. Cognitive Science 9, 147–69.Google Scholar
Berg, T. (1988). Die Abbildung des Sprachproduktionsprozesses in einem Aktivationsfluβmodell. Untersuchungen an deutschen und englischen Versprechern. Tübingen: Niemeyer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chiat, S. (1979). The role of the word in phonological development. Linguistics 17. 591–610.Google Scholar
Chiat, S. (1983). Why ‘Mikey's’ right and ‘my keys’ wrong: the significance of stress and word boundaries in a child's output system. Cognition 14, 277–300.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cruttenden, A. (1978). Assimilation in child language and elsewhere. Journal of Child Language 5, 373–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Donahue, M. (1986). Phonological constraints on the emergence of two-word utterances. Journal of Child Language 13, 209–18.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Drachmann, G. (1975). Generative phonology and child language acquisition. In Dressier, W. U. & Mares, F. V. (eds), Phonologica 1972. Munich: Fink.Google Scholar
Dyson, A. T. (1986). Development of velar consonants among normal two-year-olds. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 29, 493–8.Google Scholar
Ferguson, C. A. & Farwell, C. B. (1975). Words and sounds in early language acquisition. Language 51, 419–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferguson, C. A., Peizer, D. B. & Weeks, T. E. (1973). Model-and-replica phonological grammar of a child's first words. Lingua 31, 35–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ingram, D. (1976). Phonological analysis of a child. Glossa 10, 3–27.Google Scholar
Ingram, D. (1989). First language acquisition. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Klein, H. B. (1981). Productive strategies for the pronunciation of early polysyllabic lexical items. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 24, 389–405.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Leonard, L. B., Miller, J. A. & Brown, H. (1980). Consonant and syllable harmony in the speech of language-disordered children. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders 45, 336–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leopold, W. F. (1947). Speech development of a bilingual child. A linguist's record. Vol. II: Sound learning in the first two years. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.Google Scholar
Lindner, G. (1898). Aus dem Naturgarten der Sprache. Leipzig: Grieben's Verlag.Google Scholar
MacKay, D. G. (1987). The organization of perception and action. A theory for language and other cognitive skills. New York: Springer.Google Scholar
Macken, M. A. (1978). Permitted complexity in phonological development: one child's acquisition of Spanish consonants. Lingua 44, 219–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Macken, M. A. (1980). The child's lexical representation: the ‘puzzle-puddle-pickle’ evidence. Journal of Linguistics 16, 1–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Macken, M. A. & Barton, D. (1980). The acquisition of the voicing contrast in English: a study of voice onset time. Journal of Child Language 7, 41–74.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
MacWhinney, B. (1987). The competition model. In MacWhinney, B. (ed.), Mechanisms of language acquisition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Matthei, E. H. (1989). Crossing boundaries: more evidence for phonological constraints on early multi-word utterances. Journal of Child Language 16, 41–54.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McClelland, J. L. & Rumelhart, D. E. (1981). An interactive activation model of context effects in letter perception. Part 1: An account of basic findings. Psychological Review 88, 375–407.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Menn, L. (1975). Counter example to ‘fronting’ as a universal of child phonology. Journal of Child Language 2, 293–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Menn, L. (1983). Development of articulatory, phonetic, and phonological capabilities. In Butterworth, B. (ed.), Language production. Vol. 2. Development, writing and other language processes. London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Rosenberg, C. R. & Blelloch, G. (1988). An implementation of network learning on the Connection Machine. In Waltz, D. & Feldman, J. A. (eds), Connectionist models and their implications: readings from Cognitive Science. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Rumelhart, D. E. & McClelland, J. L. (1986). On learning the past tenses of English verbs. In McClelland, J. L., Rumelhart, D. E. & the PDF Research Group (eds), Parallel distributed processing: explorations in the microstructure of cognition. Vol. II. Applications. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schwartz, R. G., Leonard, L. B., Folger, M. K. & Wilcox, M. J. (1980). Early phonological behavior in normal-speaking and language disordered children: evidence for a synergistic view of linguistic disorders. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders 45, 357–77.Google Scholar
Seidenberg, M. S. & McClelland, J. L. (1989). A distributed, developmental model of word recognition and naming. Psychological Review 96, 523–68.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Smith, N. V. (1973). The acquisition of phonology. A case study. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Stemberger, J. P. (1989). Speech errors in early child language production. Journal of Memory and Language 28, 165–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stemberger, J. P. & Stoel-Gammon, C. (1991). The underspecification of coronals: evidence from language acquisition and performance errors. In Paradis, C. & Prunet, J. F. (eds), The special status of coronals. Orlando: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Stern, C. & Stern, W. (1928). Die Kindersprache: eine pychologische und sprachtheoretische Untersuchung. Leipzig: Barth.Google Scholar
Velten, H. V. (1943). The growth of phonemic and lexical patterns in infant language. Language 19, 281–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vihman, M. M. (1978). Consonant harmony: its scope and function in child language. In Greenberg, J. H., Ferguson, C. A. & Moravscik, E. A. (eds), Universals of human language. Vol. 2: Phonology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Waterson, N. (1976). Perception and production in the acquisition of phonology. In Raffler-Engel, W. von & Lebrun, I. (eds), Baby talk and infant speech. Amsterdam: Swets & Zeitlinger.Google Scholar