Comments on Homework #10

This assignment was generally done very well. The aim was to apply the tools that you have learned in phonology, morphology and syntax to describe as precisely as possible the differences between child and adult English, and the changes in one child's syntax/morphology over one year of development ... and this was mostly successful.

[Class average 8.5. Scores based on clarity and level of detail of analysis.]

Question 1: Phonology

The examples of a child's production of English words showed examples of omission of phonetic segments, and substitution of one segment for another. The most striking regularities were:

• No consonant clusters: pairs of consonants at the beginning or end of a syllable were always pronounced as just one consonant.
• The consonant that gets omitted in a cluster is predictable: in a cluster consisting of a continuant consonant plus a stop consonant, it is the continuant that is omitted.
• Individual segments which were replaced: /sh/ --> [s]; /th/ (voiced, and syllable-initial voiceless) --> [d]; /th/ (voiceless, syllable-final) --> [t]; /l/ --> [w].
• It's not clear that the pronunciation of "kitty" as [kIdi] is any different from the adult American English pronunciation.

One additional comment: we have stressed again and again that English spelling is only loosely related to the phonetics and phonology of English. People pronounce sounds, not letters, and it is quite common for a single sound of English to be written with two letters. Therefore, when a child pronounces a voiceless palatal fricative (written as "sh" in English) as a voiceless alveolar fricative (written as "s" in English), the child is not deleting a letter, (s)he is substituting one sound for another! Please try to ignore spelling in thinking about phonology or phonetics problems!

Question 2: Syntax/Morphology

Both the age 2;6 and the age 3;6 transcripts differ from adult English in a number of respects, but the development in Adam's speech over the course of a year is quite striking. Also, it's also striking that certain quite reasonable errors that you might expect to find hardly ever occur.

• Word omissions are common, especially of function words such as determiners and auxiliaries.
• Commonly omitted morphemes include verbal inflections such as '-s' or the possessive marker '-s' [note: many researchers have shown that this is not due to a problem with the pronunciation of the /s/, but probably reflects a grammatical problem. The evidence for this is that '-s' marking on verbs is typically still rare long after '-s' marking on plural nouns is quite consistent.]
• Subject and object noun phrases are frequently omitted ... much more so in the earlier transcript.
• Use of "wh-movement" to form questions is extremely rare in the first transcript, but rather more common in the later transcript.

Although Adam's sentences are different from adult sentences in many respects, the ordering of those words that do appear is remarkably adultlike. Subjects overwhelmingly precede verbs, as in adult English, and objects overwhelmingly follow verbs, also as in adult English. This suggests that despite the many omissions, Adam has mastered the basic word order of English at a very young age. This reflects a general finding about early child language: although the 'broken' telegraphic speech of young children easily appears to be random and unsystematic, it is in fact typically highly systematic. Much is omitted that is required in the corresponding adult language, but the word order rules of the adult language are overwhelmingly respected.

Also, the kinds of morphological errors that children make tend to be quite systematic. For example, children learning English will replace the inflected form "runs" with the uninflected form "run", but we never observe the opposite change: we never see the sentence "you run" being pronounced with an inflected verb like "you runs".