Simon WolfLING 203

8/27/15Study Questions #3

1. Smith proposes two possible mental representations for the word that his test subject

pronounces as [ɡ)ɑːk]. The first is /ɡ)ɑːk/, the form he actually articulates, and the second is

/daːk/ based on the native British English pronunciation from which his input comes.

2. The child Smith studied showed no clear voicing contrast in his own speech, but consistently

showed devoiced stops work initially, voiced stops medially, and voiceless stops finally. This

being said, it was clear that the child had some concept of a voiced/voiceless contrast based on

the behavior of oral stop-nasal stop and nasal stop-oral stop clusters. Before a voiceless

segment, nasals are deleted, but after a nasal, voiced segments are deleted.

3. Smith says that the child restructured the /s/ in <some> to /f/ and not /w/, because while

initially, he merged initial /s/ ( __[LAB] ) and /f/ to [w] due to consonant harmony and gliding,

he began to lose the consonant harmony rule and /s/ was just realized as [d]. However, words

containing <some> did not experience stopping and the initial consonant remained [w]. After

this, the next step he made was to begin to master [f] and in doing so begin to convert all /f/

from [w] to [f] in pronunciation. At this same point, he began to pronounce <some> words as

[fʌm], suggesting that his phonology had restructured that particular initial /s/ as /f/.

4. A has a tendency to velarize /t/ and /d/ before [ɫ] so <puddle> becomes [pʌgəl] and to stop /z/

so it becomes [d] causing <puzzle> to be pronounced [pʌdəl], which happens to be the correct

articulation of <puddle> for an adult. This supports the fact that children have all necessary

physical abilities for correct articulation and that the problem lies in phonology and elsewhere.