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Where Do Phonological Features Come From?: Cognitive, physical and developmental bases of distinctive speech categoriesEdited by G. Nick Clements and Rachid Ridouane
[Language Faculty and Beyond 6] 2011
► pp. 259–302
Edited by G. Nick Clements and Rachid Ridouane
[Language Faculty and Beyond 6] 2011
► pp. 259–302
Features in child phonology
Inherent, emergent, or artefacts of analysis?
The emergence of features plays a key role in any theory of phonological development that does not assume that they are innately available before the onset of speech. After reviewing Jakobson’s claims for universal orders of emergence, we consider possible criteria for feature or segment acquisition, and then discuss data from nearly 50 children (10 languages including Estonian, Finnish, Japanese, and Welsh as well as several Germanic and Romance languages). Small early vocabularies and phonetic variability make minimal pairs rare in most children. While a few children show clear evidence of utilizing features or segments, others show none, and most fall between these extremes. Gradually increasing evidence of segmental structure and systematicity reflects the slow transition to a more orderly phonology. These data support an emergentist model of feature acquisition that has many possible routes to (re-)creating phonological organization within the individual child’s mind.
Cited by (24)
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Kröger, Bernd J., Trevor Bekolay & Mengxue Cao
2022. On the Emergence of Phonological Knowledge and on Motor Planning and Motor Programming in a Developmental Model of Speech Production. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 16
Stoehr, Antje, Titia Benders, Janet G. van Hell & Paula Fikkert
2022. Feature generalization in Dutch–German bilingual and monolingual children’s speech production. First Language 42:1 ► pp. 101 ff.
Aoyama, Katsura & Barbara L. Davis
2021. Relationship between the target word form and children’s productions: place of articulation in Consonant-Vowel-Consonant (C1VC2) words in American English. Phonetica 78:1 ► pp. 65 ff.
Menn, Lise, Ann M. Peters & Yvan Rose
2021. The Menn Phonetic Mini-Corpus: Articulatory Gestures as Precursors to the Emergence of Segments. Frontiers in Psychology 12
Nielsen, Alan KS & Mark Dingemanse
2021. Iconicity in Word Learning and Beyond: A Critical Review. Language and Speech 64:1 ► pp. 52 ff.
Laing, Catherine & Elika Bergelson
2020. From babble to words: Infants’ early productions match words and objects in their environment. Cognitive Psychology 122 ► pp. 101308 ff.
Nikolsky, Aleksey, Eduard Alekseyev, Ivan Alekseev & Varvara Dyakonova
2020. The Overlooked Tradition of “Personal Music” and Its Place in the Evolution of Music. Frontiers in Psychology 10
Jo, Jinyoung & Eon-Suk Ko
2018. Korean Mothers Attune the Frequency and Acoustic Saliency of Sound Symbolic Words to the Linguistic Maturity of Their Children. Frontiers in Psychology 9
Rose, Yvan
2018. Chapter 2. Phonological categories and their manifestation in child phonology. In Sources of Variation in First Language Acquisition [Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 22], ► pp. 45 ff.
Rose, Yvan
2020. There is no phonology without abstract categories: A commentary on Ambridge (2020). First Language 40:5-6 ► pp. 626 ff.
Vihman, Marilyn M.
2017. Learning words and learning sounds: Advances in language development. British Journal of Psychology 108:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Dresher, B. Elan
2016. Contrast in Phonology, 1867–1967: History and Development. Annual Review of Linguistics 2:1 ► pp. 53 ff.
Lleó, Conxita
2016. Bilingualism and Child Phonology. In Oxford Handbook Topics in Linguistics,
Donegan, Patricia
2015. The Emergence of Phonological Representation. In The Handbook of Language Emergence, ► pp. 33 ff.
Vihman, Marilyn
2015. Perception and Production in Phonological Development. In The Handbook of Language Emergence, ► pp. 437 ff.
Vihman, Marilyn
2018. Chapter 10. The development of prosodic structure. In The Development of Prosody in First Language Acquisition [Trends in Language Acquisition Research, 23], ► pp. 185 ff.
Vihman, Marilyn May
2015. Acquisition of the English Sound System. In The Handbook of English Pronunciation, ► pp. 331 ff.
Laing, Catherine E.
2014. A phonological analysis of onomatopoeia in early word production. First Language 34:5 ► pp. 387 ff.
Laing, Catherine E.
2019. Phonological Motivation for the Acquisition of Onomatopoeia: An Analysis of Early Words. Language Learning and Development 15:2 ► pp. 177 ff.
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2014. Theories, I: Formalist and Perception Models. In Phonological Development, ► pp. 245 ff.
[no author supplied]
2014. References. In Phonological Development, ► pp. 349 ff.
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2014. The Transition to Language Use. In Phonological Development, ► pp. 145 ff.
[no author supplied]
2014. Theories, II: Functionalist or Emergentist Models. In Phonological Development, ► pp. 277 ff.
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