This paper examines the speech of two functionally misarticulating Jordanian children and illustrates the variability of misarticulation patterns as well as the failure of markedness to account for them. The presentation is very similar to work by Gierut describing misarticulating English-learning children (Gierut 1984, 1985), but in this case the children are learning Arabic. The term ‘functional misarticulation’ is typically used to describe the speech of speakers whose chronic articulatory errors cannot be attributed to any obvious organic disorder such as hearing impairment or cleft palate (Ingram 1976, Compton 1970). The basic assumption of much of the work done on speech misarticulations is that children's knowledge is identical to that of the ambient speech community (Compton 1975, Lorentz 1976). Within this framework, misarticulators are viewed as a homogenous group. Any discrepancy between the misarticulators' system and the ambient system is described as a ‘process’ (Shriberg & Kwiatkowski 1982). However, the many diverse phonological rules that have been posited to derive the misarticulators' surface structure from underlying structure make it difficult to arrive at any but gross commonalities across functional misarticulation systems (Ingram 1976). Such an assumption is a clear misrepresentation of the apparent differences across the misarticulation systems (Dinnsen, Elbert & Weismer 1980).

Formant measurements show sex and age differences in the formant patterns of a single vowel category. Comparisons of the formant frequency values of men, women and children indicate low, middle and high values, respectively (Chiba & Kajiyama 1941, Potter & Steinberg 1950, Peterson & Barney 1952). The differences are found for all vowel categories, and they have generally been interpreted as a consequence of different vocal tract size.

Many languages in South East Asia have voiceless nasal consonants that contrast with their voiced counterparts. What has not been reported previously is that there are two distinct types of voiceless nasals. We will begin by considering the more well-known type, found in languages such as Burmese. These voiceless nasals are usually said to have an open glottis for most of the articulation, but some voicing for the period just before the stricture is broken (Ladefoged 1971: 11). In this view they have two parts. The first is necessary to distinguish them from their voiced counterparts. The second distinguishes one voiceless nasal from another, by making the place of articulation more apparent; the voiced offglide from the nasal into the vowel has formant transitions that are characteristic of each place of articulation. Dantsuji has shown that, in addition, the voiced portion of the voiceless nasals in Burmese “includes significant cues which can distinguish points of articulation” (Dantsuji 1986: 10). Despite the small voiced portion, in most phonological treatments of these sounds, a voiceless nasal consonant is considered not as a sequence of two items, a voiceless segment followed by a voiced segment, but as a single voiceless unit with a low level phonetic rule inserting the voicing towards the end. Burmese is a textbook example, with forms as shown in Table 1 (from Maddieson 1984; also in Ladefoged 1993: 282).

The previous issue of the Journal contained a discussion by Peter Ladefoged about interpreting the information in a speech waveform (JIPA, 21, 32–34), noting that examination of waveforms displays is becoming commonplace with the easy availability of personal computer tools for digitizing and editing. As Ladefoged noted:

“Several aspects of sounds are clearly distinguishable from the waveforms of a phrase. Stop closures are very evident, as are differences between voiced sounds which have repetitive waveforms and voiceless sounds which do not. Differences in amplitude can be used to distinguish high frequency, high intensity sibilants from lower intensity non-sibilant fricatives; and nasals and laterals usually have smaller amplitudes than the louder adjacent vowels. An expanded view of the waveform allows us to see intervals between peaks in the damped wave of a voiced sound, and thus to calculate the frequency of the first formant. Nasals can often be distinguished from vowels in these expanded waveforms, not only by their smaller amplitudes but also by the less clear formant structure.”

In the IPA chart which was the outcome of the IPA 1989 Kiel Convention, the glottal fricatives [h, ɦ] were included, as they were in previous charts. Unlike Kloster-Jensen (JIPA 1991: 42), I believe we were correct to leave [h, ɦ] as they were, in the space for glottal fricatives. In order to justify his belief that the [h] is not a glottal fricative, Kloster-Jensen recruits two good referees, Ladefoged (1962) and Brücke (1876). Other phoneticians also share the same belief, that the [h] is not a glottal fricative (for example, Pike 1943: 140, O'Connor 1973: 143–144), but many others do believe that [h] is really a glottal fricative. Here I want to give two good reasons why we should consider [h, ɦ] glottal fricatives, and leave them as they are in the IPA chart. The first reason is a general one, and is based on aerodynamic reasoning. The second is based on observations of productions of [h] in Hebrew, in Arabic and in Finnish.

There were several omissions and errors in issue 21.1 of the Journal for which the Editor apologizes and offers these corrections.

Two errors occurred in the References to the Research Note “The woman behind ‘Arthur’” by Michael MacMahon (JIPA, 21.1: 29–31). The date of Abercrombie's review of Bronstein et al is 1978, not 1964 as printed. And Gertude Sellon's Short Stories about Animals was published in 1882, with a second edition in 1892, not in 1876 as printed.

Several mistakes were also made in preparing the Illustration of Hong Kong Cantonese by Eric Zee for publication (JIPA, 21.1: 46–48). An alveolar trill [r] was included on the consonant chart - this is not a segment of Cantonese. The high tone mark for the word [tsha] ‘fork’ was omitted. In the listing of vowel symbols a length mark was included after the symbol [e] in the alternate transcription in which length distinctions among vowels are overtly marked. This vowel is short and should not have been followed by a length mark. In the listing of diphthongs, the second element of the diphthong [ɐi] was omitted in its first occurrence. On the positive side, Dr. Zee also writes to say that, following some new work on acoustically analyzing the vowels and diphthongs of a number of speakers, he feels that more accurate descriptions of these segments could be given in place of the impressionistic ones in the published illustration. It is hoped that the Journal will be able to publish this new research in due course.