PHONOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT: PRODUCTION

The acquisition by an infant of the phonological system of its first language, as evidenced in signs of use.

An infant’s first productions are purely reflexive, consisting of wailing, laughter, gurgling etc. in response to immediate sensations. Its first speech-like productions take the form of babbling, which begins at between six and ten months and is characterised by a limited range of sounds resembling adult consonant-vowel (CV) syllables. There is disagreement as to whether babbling is unrelated to later phonological development or whether it is a precursor of speech. At a later stage, babbling adopts intonation contours which seem to mimic those of adults. Intonation thus appears to be acquired independently of phoneme development.

The question has been raised of whether there is a universal order of phoneme acquisition. It is difficult to determine when a particular phoneme has been ‘acquired’: it may be used accurately in certain contexts but not in others. Furthermore, the ability to recognise a phoneme may precede its emergence in production by quite a long period. That said, findings suggest that, whatever the ambient language, infants do indeed acquire certain sounds early on: namely, nasal consonants, labials, stops and back vowels. Some commentators have concluded that such forms must be innate; however, the phenomenon could equally be due to early limitations on the child’s perceptual system or to the child employing the easiest articulatory gestures first. Some evidence for innateness comes from the fact that sounds which are universally infrequent (such as English / æ /) tend to emerge late.

An alternative suggestion is that the order in which phonemes are acquired may reflect their frequency in the input to which the child is exposed. However, the evidence is unclear, and it is noteworthy that the omnipresent /ð/ in English emerges late.

 Children develop systematic ways of reducing adult words to forms which match their production capacities. They might consistently voice unvoiced sounds (paper = [be:b ə:]) or replace fricatives by stops (see = [ti:]). A common feature is the simplification of consonant clusters (train = [ten]). Analogy seems to play a part, with sets of similar words showing similar pronunciation features. But there are often anomalies, termed idioms: single words which continue to be pronounced wrongly when the rest of a set has been acquired phonologically. There are also chain shifts (if truck is pronounced duck,it may cause duck to become guck).

See also: Phonological development: perception

Further reading: Fletcher and Garman (1986: Part II); Fletcher and MacWhinney (1995: Chaps 10–12); Ingram (1989, 1999); Menn and Stoel-Gammon (1995)

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The encyclopaedic view of meaning

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Schematic systems

Semantic structure

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Image schemas