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Patterns of Gestural Overlap Account for Positional Fricative Neutralization in Child Phonology

Patterns of Gestural Overlap Account for Positional Fricative Neutralization in Child Phonology. Tara McAllister Montclair State University, Montclair , New Jersey mcallistert@mail.montclair.edu. Outline.

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Patterns of Gestural Overlap Account for Positional Fricative Neutralization in Child Phonology

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  1. Patterns of Gestural Overlap Account for Positional Fricative Neutralization in Child Phonology Tara McAllister Montclair State University, Montclair, New Jersey mcallistert@mail.montclair.edu

  2. Outline • An interesting data set from phonological acquisition (positional fricative gliding). • Why these child data are difficult to square with what we know about adult phonological typology. • Claim: A phonetically-based approach to phonology makes it possible to give a principled account of child-specific phenomena. • Fricative substitution errors are analyzed as a phonologized response to a child-specific articulatory limitation on overlapping vowel and fricative gestures. • Positional asymmetry emerges as the consequence of differing degrees of gestural overlap permitted in syllable-initial versus syllable-final position (Articulatory Phonology).

  3. Case study data • Data were collected from a single case study subject between the ages of 3;9 and 4;3. • ‘Ben’ is a monolingual English learner with severe phonological delay/disorder. • Active phonological patterns in addition to the pattern of interest: • cluster reduction • velar fronting • liquid gliding • final devoicing • debuccalization of coda stops

  4. Positional neutralization of fricatives (PFN) Ben’s positional fricative neutralization pattern (3;9-3;10): • Syllable-initial fricatives are realized as glides. [ji] see[jaʔ] shark [joĩ] sewing[jip] sheep [jiba] zebra[wuʔ] food [wodaʔ] forgot

  5. Positional neutralization of fricatives (PFN) Ben’s positional fricative neutralization pattern (3;9-3;10): • Syllable-initial fricatives are realized as glides. [ji] see[jaʔ] shark [joĩ] sewing[jip] sheep [jiba] zebra[wuʔ] food [wodaʔ] forgot • Syllable-final fricatives preserve faithful manner (not necessarily place or voicing). [mas] mouse [jʊʃ] fish [bis] beans[bʌʃbaʔ] Spongebob [babajis] strawberries[was] five

  6. Why is PFN of interest? • Not unique to Ben. • Numerous studies have documented children acquiring fricatives in syllable-final before syllable-initial contexts. • In babbling (Gildersleeve-Neumann et al. 2000; Oller & Eilers, 1982; Redford et al. 1997) • In meaningful speech (Dinnsen, 1996; Edwards, 1996; Farwell, 1976; Ferguson, 1978; Stites, Demuth, & Kirk, 2004; Stoel-Gammon, 1985) • Pattern is not universal, but general consensus is that fricatives in final position have a favored status in acquisition (Edwards, 1979).

  7. Why is PFN of interest? • PFN is a child-specific pattern that reverses a strong bias in adult phonological typology. • In fully-developed phonologies, the maximum range of featural contrasts is realized in initial/prevocalic position. • Example: Manner contrasts in Korean (Ahn, 1998) • Stop, fricative, affricate manner allowed in onset position. • All manner contrasts neutralized to stop in coda position. • PFN belongs to set of child processes of neutralization in strong position(Dinnsen & Farris-Trimble, 2008; Inkelas & Rose, 2003, 2008; McAllister, 2009) • Challenge notion of continuity of child and adult grammars.

  8. Neutralization in strong position Let’s try to model PFN with a general constraint *Fricatives: • In a positional faithfulness framework (Beckman, 1997),we need a constraint enhancing faithfulness to weak/final position. • Ident-manner-weak >> *Fricatives >> Ident-manner • In a positional markedness framework (Smith, 2000, 2002), we need a constraint limiting featural contrasts in strong position. • *#Fricatives >> Ident-manner >> *Fricatives • If Ident-manner-weak or *#Fricatives are possible constraints, we should find examples of adult phonologies with featural neutralization in strong position. • Such grammars are in fact unattested.

  9. Phonetics in child phonology • The challenge: Model children’s positional neutralization without making incorrect predictions for the possible range of variation in adult grammars. • My claim: The most principled accounts of child-specific phonological patterns have adopted a phonetically-based approach to phonology (Dinnsen& Farris-Trimble, 2008; Inkelas& Rose, 2003, 2007; McAllister, 2009; Pater, 1997). • It is uncontroversial that children and adults experience the physical act of producing/perceiving speech in different ways. • Different articulatory anatomy and speech-motor control • Different perceptual sensitivities

  10. Phonetically-based phonology • Since children and adults are subject to different low-level phonetic pressures, the phonetically-based model predicts divergence in their grammars as well. • If a speaker experiences a major change at the phonetic level (e.g. articulatory maturation), the grammar can change in response to the new phonetic pressures. • Accounts for elimination of child-specific phonological phenomena in the course of typical maturation. • I will propose a formal phonological model of Ben’s PFN pattern with roots in a child-specific articulatory limitation.

  11. Child-specific phonetic limitations • A phonetic difference between children and adults: Children have difficulty moving the tongue independent of the jaw. • Tongue is motorically complex, with many degrees of movement freedom (Kent, 1992). • Control of the jaw, a bilaterally hinged joint, is motorically simple. • In early stages of motor maturation, tongue moves passively with the active jaw (MacNeilage& Davis, 1990). • Even after some capacity for independent tongue control is acquired, acoustic measurements reveal an ongoing preference for jaw-dominated gestures (Edwards, Fourakis, Beckman, & Fox, 1999)

  12. Child-specific phonetic limitations • My proposal: Preference for jaw-dominated gestures takes on phonological status. • Move-As-Unit: ‘Avoid jaw-independent tongue gestures.’ • Move-As-Unit can be analogized to effort-minimizing constraints in adult grammars. • Lazy: ‘Minimize articulatory effort’ (Kirchner, 2001) • MinimiseEffort(Flemming, 2001) • Difference is that Move-As-Unit responds to a type of movement that is effortful for children but not for adults.

  13. Why are fricatives dispreferred? • In adult speech, fricative-containing syllables involve independent tongue and jaw control. • In a fricative-vowel syllable, the jaw reaches its target before the tongue tip. (Tongue remains high to sustain frication while jaw lowers in anticipation of the upcoming vowel.) • In a vowel-fricative syllable, the tongue tip reaches its target before the jaw (Mooshammer et al., 2006). • A speaker who moves tongue and jaw as one unit cannot achieve this coarticulation. • A typical coarticulatedfricative-vowel or vowel-fricative transition will thus violate Move-As-Unit. • Stops and glides do not require differentiated control of tongue and jaw (Kent, 1992).

  14. Why the positional asymmetry? • Spectrograms of Ben’s output reveal an asymmetry between initial and final fricatives: • Syllable-initial fricatives make an immediate transition into the following vowel. • Syllable-final fricatives tend to be separated from the vowel by silence and/or aspiration noise. • Pause separating vowel and coda fricative indicates that the gestures may not overlap at all. • No Move-As-Unitviolation.

  15. Why the positional asymmetry? • This pattern is not unique to Ben: Target ‘nose’ produced by a typically developing child aged 2;11

  16. Why the positional asymmetry? Target ‘kiss’ produced by a typically developing child aged 3;6 • Non-overlapping vowel-fricative transitions can be observed in the speech of typically developing children.

  17. How general is the phenomenon? • Measured 237 vowel-fricative and fricative-vowel transitions elicited from 17 TD children aged 2;11-5;7 (mean 4;7). • Average duration of silence/aspiration noise separating a vowel and a coda fricative was a substantial 88.4 ms. • In 58.8% of tokens, this interval was ≥ 25% of total vocalic interval (criterion for preaspiration adapted from Gordeeva& Scobbie, 2010). • This is despite the fact that adult American English is thought to lack preaspiration of fricatives (Turk, Nakai, & Sugahara, 2006). • There was no significant difference in the duration of silence/aspiration before a voiced versus a voiceless fricative. • Between an onset fricative and the following vowel, the mean duration of non-canonical frication noise was 20.4 ms. • Only 4.1% met criterion for postaspiration.

  18. Why the positional asymmetry? • Conclusion: Child speakers produce fricative-vowel transitions with a greater degree of overlap than vowel-fricative transitions. • Lesser Move-As-Unit violation in the latter case. • However, evidence that fricatives and vowels do not always overlap in final position is insufficient to account for PFN. • Necessary to explain why a comparable non-overlapped transition is not available in syllable-initial position.

  19. Constraints on gestural timing • Articulatory Phonology: Gestures stand in characteristic timing relations with respect to one another (Browman & Goldstein, 1986 et seq.). • Characteristic patterns of gestural overlap can be encoded in Optimality-Theoretic coordination constraints (Gafos, 2002). • CV-Coord: Align(C, C-Center, V, Onset) • VC-Coord: Align(V, Release, C, Target) • Non-overlapping transitions violate CV-Coord/VC-Coord • If CV-Coord >> VC-Coord, non-overlapping gestures will be penalized more heavily in initial relative to final position.

  20. Constraints on gestural timing • Experimental evidence of syllable position effects suggests that CV-Coord >> VC-Coordmay be the default. • Degree of overlap between a vowel and a coda consonant varies with changes in rate or prosody, but onset-vowel transitions maintain stable timing across all conditions(Tuller & Kelso, 1990, 1991). • Nam et al. (2010): CV and VC transitions have different coupling modes and consequently different coupling strength. • CV coupling is in-phase (synchronous), more stable. • VC coupling is anti-phase (offset by 180˚), less stable. • Accounts for developmental and typological primacy of the CV syllable shape.

  21. Modeling Ben’s grammar • PFN will occur when CV-Coord>> Faith >> VC-Coord. • Harmonic Grammar framework turns out to be the best fit for the data, but here classic OT is used for simplicity. Table 1. An initial fricative is replaced with a glide.

  22. Modeling Ben’s grammar Table 2. A final fricative preserves faithful manner.

  23. More evidence for the gestural account • Before acquiring faithful fricatives in all contexts, Ben went through an intermediate stage (3;11-4;2) in which initial fricatives were realized with an epenthetic glide: [sjɔ] saw[sjak] sock [sjaʊt] salt[sjaoʊ]share [sjoʊ] sew [ʃjaoʊ] shell • Epenthesis is a truly unexpected repair because Ben’s phonology at the time lacked initial consonant clusters, including obstruent-glide clusters. [dɑk]clock[bun]spoon [bɑ:t] bread[dʊsɛn] question

  24. More evidence for the gestural account • ArticulatoryPhonology literature reveals several cases where apparent epenthetic segments are the perceptual consequence of non-overlapping gestural coordination. • Perceived epenthetic schwa in coda clusters in Moroccan Colloquial Arabic (Gafos, 2002). • Perceived epenthetic schwa in English speakers’ attempted non-native clusters (Davidson, 2003). • Vocal tract is briefly open during non-overlapped transition; sound produced is perceived as an epenthetic segment. • Transition from a vowel to a coda fricative has come to feature a palatal glide in some fully-developed phonologies, e.g. luz, ‘light’ [lujs] in certain dialects of Brazilian Portuguese(Albano, 1999; Operstein, 2010).

  25. More evidence for the gestural account • If Ident-Consonantal is promoted above CV-Coord, the optimal candidate will feature a non-overlapped fricative-vowel transition instead of glide substitution.

  26. More evidence for the gestural account • So why don’t we hear a transitional glide in Ben’s final vowel-fricative transitions? • Visual inspection of coda fricatives shows cessation of voicing before onset of frication. • Preaspirationobscures formant transitions that would create percept of epenthetic glide. • Finding that glottal opening occurs in advance of the oral constriction for a fricative coda is entirely consistent with the gestural coordination analysis pursued here. • Syllable position effects affecting timing of gestures within a compound segment (e.g. nasal, voiceless obstruent). • In initial position, both gestures are roughly synchronous. • In final position, glottal opening gesture tends to precede the oral constriction (Krakow, 1999).

  27. Conclusions • PFN is difficult to model without creating incorrect predictions for the range of variation in adult typology. • Roots in children’s articulatory limitations can account for absence of pattern from adult grammars. • Positional nature of fricative neutralization follows from the fact that inter-gestural timing is more tightly constrained in CV than VC contexts. • Provides new evidence that patterns of inter-gestural coordination previously described in adult speakers are also influential in developmental phonology.

  28. References Ahn, Sang-cheol (1998). An introduction to Korean phonology. Seoul: Hanshin Publishing. Albano, Eleonora C. (1999). A gestural solution for some glide epenthesis problems. In Ohala, Hasegawa, Ohala, Granville & Bailey (1999). 1785-1788. Beckman, Jill N. (1997). Positional faithfulness, positional neutralisation, and Shonavowel harmony. Phonology14. 1-46. Browman, Catherine P. & Louis Goldstein (1986). Towards an articulatory phonology. PhonologyYearbook3. 219-252. Browman, Catherine P. & Louis Goldstein (1988). Some notes on syllable structure in Articulatory Phonology. Phonetica45. 140-155. Browman, Catherine P. & Louis Goldstein (1990). Tiers in articulatory phonology, with some implications for casual speech. In Kingston & Beckman (1990). 341-376. Davidson, Lisa (2003). The atoms of phonological representation: gestures, coordination and perceptual features in consonant cluster phonotactics. PhD dissertation, Johns Hopkins University. Dinnsen, Daniel A. (1996). Context effects in the acquisition of fricatives. In Bernhardt, Gilbert,& Ingram (1996). 136-148. Dinnsen, Daniel A. & Ashley W. Farris-Trimble (2008). The prominence paradox. In Daniel A. Dinnsen & Judith A. Gierut (eds.) Optimality Theory, phonological acquisition and disorders. London: Equinox Publishing Ltd. 277-308. Edwards, Mary Louise (1979). Word position in fricative acquisition. Papers and Reports in ChildLanguage Development16. 67-75. Edwards, Mary Louise (1996). Word position and the production of fricatives. In Bernhardt, Gilbert, & Ingram (1996). 149-158. Edwards, Jan, MariosFourakis, Mary E. Beckman & Robert A. Fox (1999). Characterizing knowledge deficits in phonological disorders. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research42, 169–186. Farwell, Carol B. (1976). Some strategies in the early production of fricatives. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development 12. 97-104. Ferguson, Charles A. (1978). Fricatives in child language acquisition. In Vladimir Honsa & Martha J. Hardman-de-Bautista (eds.) Papers on linguistics and child language. The Hague, Netherlands: Mouton. 93-115.

  29. References Flemming, Edward (2001). Scalar and categorical phenomena in a unified model of phonetics and phonology. Phonology18. 7-44. Gafos, Adamantios (2002). A grammar of gestural coordination. NLLT2b0. 269–337. Gildersleeve-Neumann, Christina E., Barbara L. Davis & Peter F. MacNeilage (2000). Contingencies governing production of for fricatives, affricates and liquids in babbling. Applied Psycholinguistics 21. 341-363. Gordeeva, Olga B., & James M. Scobbie (2010). Preaspiration as a correlate of word-final voice in Scottish English fricatives. In Susanne Fuchs, Martine Toda, & MarzenaZygis (eds.) Turbulent Sounds: An Interdisciplinary Guide. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 167-207. Inkelas, Sharon & Yvan Rose (2003). Velar fronting revisited. In Barbara Beachley, Amanda Brown, & Frances Conlin (eds.) Proceedings of the 27th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. 334-345. Inkelas, Sharon & Yvan Rose (2008). Positional neutralization: a case study from child language. Lg83. 707-736. Kent, Raymond D. (1992). The biology of phonological maturation. In Charles A. Ferguson, LiseMenn, & Carol Stoel-Gammon (eds.) Phonological development: models, research, implications. Timonium, MD: York Press. 65-90. Kirchner, Robert (2001). An effort-based approach to consonant lenition. New York: Routledge. Krakow, Rena A. (1999). Physiological organization of syllables: a review. JPh27. 23-54. MacNeilage, Peter F. & Barbara L. Davis (1990). Acquisition of speech production: frames, then content. In Marc Jeannerod (ed.) Attention and performance: Vol. 13, motor representation and control. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum. 453-475 McAllister, Tara (2009). The articulatory basis of positional asymmetries in phonological acquisition. PhD dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mooshammer, Christine, Philip Hoole & AnjaGeumann (2006). Interarticulator cohesion within coronal consonant production. JASA 120. 1028-1039. Nam, Hosung, Louis Goldstein & Elliot Saltzman (2010). Self-organization of syllable structure: a coupled oscillator model. In François Pellegrino, EgidioMarisco & IoanaChitoran (eds.) Approaches to phonological complexity. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 299-328.

  30. References Oller, D. Kimbrough, & Rebecca E. Eilers (1982). Similarity of babbling in Spanish-leaning and English-learning babies. Journal of Child Language9. 565-577. Operstein, Natalie (2010). Consonant structure and prevocalization. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Pater, Joe (1997). Minimal violation and phonological development. Language Acquisition6. 201-253. Redford, Melissa A., Peter F. MacNeilage & Barbara L. Davis (1997). Perceptual and motor influences on final consonant inventories in babbling. Phonetica54. 172-186. Smith, Jennifer L. (2000). Prominence, augmentation, and neutralization in phonology. In L. Conathan, J. Good, D. Kavitskaya, A. Wulf, & A. Yu (Eds.), Proceedings of BLS 26 (pp. 247-257). Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Linguistics Society. [Published version has formatting errors; corrected version available as Rutgers Optimality Archive #727 (2005).] Smith, Jennifer L. (2002). Phonological augmentation in prominent positions. Doctoral dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Stites, Jessica, Katherine Demuth, & Cecilia Kirk (2004). Markedness versus frequency effects in coda acquisition. In AlejnaBrugos, LinneaMicciulla, & Christine E. Smith (eds.) Proceedings of the 28thAnnual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville, MA:  Cascadilla Press. 565-576. Stoel-Gammon, Carol (1985). Phonetic inventories, 15-24 months: a longitudinal study. Journal ofSpeech and Hearing Research18. 505-512. Tuller, Betty & J. A. Scott Kelso (1990). Phase transitions in speech production and their perceptual consequences. In Marc Jeannerod (ed.) Attention and Performance XIII. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. 429-452. Tuller, Betty & J. A. Scott Kelso (1991). The production and perception of syllable structure. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research34. 501-504. Turk, Alice, Satsuki Nakai, & Mariko Sugahara (2006). Acoustic segment durations in prosodic research: a practical guide. In Stefan Sudhoff, DenisaLenertová, Roland Meyer, Sandra Pappert, Petra Augurzky, Ina Mleinek, Nicole Richter, & Johannes Schließer (eds.) Methods in empirical prosody research. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. 1–27.

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