Previous studies have defined the earliest stage of child language to be the stage at which an uninitiated speaker of adult language can understand sentences spoken by the child. Upon the examination of the language of one child, aged 1 year and 7 months, it became evident that she could talk, even though it was equally evident that she didn't use…

Revised version of a paper presented to the 1972 TESOL Convention in Washington, D.C. (DD)

Reviews research on prosody and segmental perception, segmentation and invariance, categorical perception of speech and nonspeech, feature detectors, scaling speech sounds to an auditory-articulatory space, acoustic-phonetic dependencies within the syllable, higher order (nonphonetic) factors in the comprehension of fluent speech, and cerebral…

Examines the relationship between phonetic substitution patterns in child speech and sound change patterns in dialects of adult language, basing an explanation of these phenomena on acoustic data and language universals. (AM)

Describes phonological sensitivity at different grain sizes as a good predictor of reading acquisition in all languages. Presents information on development of phonological sensitivity for syllables, onsets, and rimes. Illustrates that phoneme-level skills develop fastest in children acquiring orthographically consistent languages with simple…

Examined ability of Quebec French-speaking first graders to categorize words on the basis of vowel categories. Found that ability to categorize vowels does not develop uniformly but is affected by degree of spectral/articulatory proximity between vowels, by syllable structure, and potentially by characteristics of the input phonology. (JPB)

This paper addresses the difficulty experienced by many non-mother-tongue speakers in acquiring the click sounds of the Xhosa language. Eighteen English- and Afrikaans-speaking students, aged 10 through 13, with no previous knowledge of Xhosa were instructed and tested in making the 15 different click sounds that occur in the Xhosa language. The…

British English and Nepali monophthongs (pure vowels) are analyzed and compared in terms of their distinctive features, and pedagogical implications for Nepali learners of English as a Second Language are discussed. First, the two vowel systems are outlined and described in terms of eight distinctive features: vowel height, backness, lip rounding,…

Certain simplification and reduction processes used by Arabs in learning English as a second language are examined, such as: (1) simplification of syllables, (2) deletion of English articles, and (3) generation of English questions by using only intonation and leaving word order intact. The study is made from the perspective of two theories of…

This is a report on the deviant phonological system of a 4-year-old child. Although this system is characterized by deletions, assimilations, simplifications, and distortions, there is a regularity in the system which lends itself to systematic phonological analysis. Based on an examination of sample phonological deviations, the following rules…

The phonologies of three English-speaking children at approximately two years of age are examined. Two of the analyses are based on published studies; the third is based on observations and recordings made by the author. Summary statements on phonemic inventories and on correspondences with the adult model are presented. For the third case, fairly…

The pronunciations of children do not merely represent accidental misses with respect to adult pronunciation. Children employ substitutions and deletions in highly systematic ways; child pronunciations reflect a set of simplification strategies. The major common processes of both normal and abnormal child phonology result in simplification of…

This paper proposes a set of underlying vowels, alternate to those of Chomsky and Halle, to account for vowel alternations. This phonetic representational system, which is to a degree an extension of Chomsky's and Halle's basic framework, is demonstrated in the Laxing Rule and the Vowel Alternation Rule for all vowel variables. An appendix…

The idea of semantic features has taken some force within psychology and a number of research workers have suggested that semantic acquisition is, in some manner, determined by semantic components. This notion has come to be called the "semantic feature hypothesis". An examination of the semantic feature hypothesis was made by testing 80…