On Under-reported Monolingual Child Phonology

Elena Babatsouli, Elena Babatsouli

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781788928960
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Psicolinguistica

This book compiles original studies investigating crosslinguistic child phonological development in typical and atypical settings, that is, protolanguage phonology. The chapters address topics and issues not widely or exhaustively reported in the literature, such as research on under-represented languages and foci of interest, as well as information that has remained little-known to the field. It documents recent developments on typically developing populations, and atypical developmental speech in children with autism, developmental language disorder affecting speech, childhood apraxia of speech, phonological assessment and intervention, phonological awareness in (a)typical contexts affecting literacy, and motor speech analysis in speech sound disorders. The book will be of interest to linguists and academic researchers, as well as postgraduate students who are investigating child language acquisition in monolingual settings.

1 Prolegomenon

Elena Babatsouli

Ingram et al. (2018: 27) cite: ‘in the beginning was the word, and the word was speech’, going back to the ancestral ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ Λόγος ‘in the beginning was Speech’ (Bible, John 1:1). Speech permits communication even in the rudimentary form of exclamations; it is the foremost feature of language and the only one that is biologically bestowed. Variable types of speech sounds and their combinations in a particular language form that particular language’s phonological system with phonotactics that clearly distinguish it from other languages’ identifiable combinations cross-linguistically. The processes that evolve during the development of speech, that is the acquisition of a language’s phonology, are very revealing for our understanding of language acquisition and the development of cognitive processes. The present volume aims at compiling studies investigating such beginnings of speech, that is, protolanguage phonology (Babatsouli & Ingram, 2018). In line with its undercurrent under-reported theme, the book seeks to publicize topics and issues not widely or exhaustively reported in the literature, such as research on under-represented languages and foci of interest, as well as lesser known information that is of interest to the field.

Thus, this prolegomenon ensues as follows. The first section provides a brief overview of historical foundations in the scientific study of childhood and child speech. Second comes an enumeration of studies in child phonological development, followed by a synopsis of abstract theories in phonological development. Two more sections follow: one on the origins of the International Child Phonology Conference and one discussing the specific focus and contents of the book. This introductory chapter ends with an epilogue.

Some Historical Foundations

To those freshly immersed in the study of what comes out of the mouth of babes, it may come as a surprise that the scientific field of child phonological development, when viewed in terms of the entire course of human history (Babatsouli, 2019a), is as infantile as its principal informants, the children. The following remark on this is very telling:

It is a well recognized fact in the history of science that the very subjects which concern our dearest interests, which lie nearest our hearts, are exactly those which are the last to submit to scientific methods, to be reduced to scientific law. Thus it has come to pass that while babies are born and grow up in every household, and while the gradual unfolding of their faculties has been watched with the keenest interest and intensest joy by even intelligent and scientific fathers and mothers from time immemorial, yet very little has been done in the scientific study of this most important of all possible subjects – the ontogenetic evolution of the faculties of the human mind. (Shinn, 1900: 1)

Despite the sluggish pace, we ought to feel fortunate that the study of child language is so vibrant today. In the Middle Ages (5th–15th century), performationistic interpretations reined and children were viewed as miniature adults (Philippe Ariès, 1962, in Cunningham, 1998), that is, fully developed only smaller in size. With the coming of the age of Enlightenment (17th–18th century), John Locke (1689) suggested that the child’s mind is a tabula rasa, much like the Aristotelian γραμμάτειον ‘unscribed slate’, upon which experience and consequent knowledge (including linguistic competence) accumulates. This passive view of the child was later complemented by Jean Jacques Rousseau’s (1762) contention that children, as ‘noble savages’, have a natural and innate plan for growth that follows stages. Among the first scholars to pioneer the scientific observation of a single child was Charles Darwin publishing A Biographical Sketch of an Infant in 1877. Darwin’s detailed naturalistic observation of his son, done in note cards and field books, has subsequently set the ground for a surge of parent-linguists’ investigations of their off-springs’ linguistic development in the form of diary notes (e.g. Preyer, 1882; Shinn, 1900; Stern & Stern, 1907; Kenyeres, 1938; Piaget, 1955; Szuman, 1955) that were sometimes anecdotal in scope (e.g. Ronjat, 1913). Such general reflections on early child (and language) development are generally known as ‘baby biography’ (e.g. Kent, 1992). For an elaboration on historical and international perspectives of childhood, see Ritter (2007).

Investigations in Protolanguage

Actual studies in protolanguage phonology mostly start making their appearance early in the 20th century and keep accumulating later on in major languages like French (e.g. Bloch, 1921; Grammont, 1902), German (e.g. Preyer, 1882; Stern & Stern, 1907), Hungarian (Kenyeres, 1926) Standard American (Holmes, 1927), Italian (e.g. von Raffler-Engel, 1965), Russian (e.g. Gvozdev, 1948), Polish (Szuman, 1955), etc. For a comprehensive early review of studies in first language acquisition, see Ingram (1989). It is interesting to note that, even as late as the 1940s, studying child speech was controversial in the realm of science as disclosed by Werner F. Leopold’s silent endeavors behind closed doors at Northwestern University (1947). There have afterwards been several case studies of single children’s phonological development investigated longitudinally over several months and years along the developmental path (e.g. Babatsouli, 2013; Bunta et al., 2006; Burling, 1959; Deuchar & Clark, 1996; Holm & Dodd, 1999; Kappa, 2009; Leopold, 1947; Macken, 1979; Major, 1977; Smith, 1973; Schnitzer & Krasinski, 1994, 1996; Tse & Ingram, 1987).

The overwhelming majority of such case studies involve bilingual rather than monolingual children, reflecting the general pattern in the world’s population (Babatsouli, 2019b; Babatsouli, forthcoming). Neil Smith’s (1973) seminal study, for instance, customarily considered to be an investigation in monolingual English, has involved a child exposed to second language (accented) input (cf. Babatsouli & Ball, 2020). It’s worth keeping in mind that differentiating between monolingual and bilingual contexts in language acquisition may not necessarily be a straightforward task. The contribution in this volume on Valley Zapotec (Stemberger & Chávez-Peón, Chapter 6) is on a threatened indigenous language of the Otomanguean family, with Mexican Spanish, a Romance language, encroaching in the main towns and on media; encroachment is fortunately very limited in the village of San Lucas in Oaxaca State; Zapotec is a very vibrant language spoken by children and adults in that community, in a primarily monolingual context. Lastly, cross-generational research has also made a first appearance with Smith’s (2010) case study comparing his son’s and grandson’s phonologies in development.

Phonological development has further been investigated through the study of many individual children as the extensive work of several developmental phonologists has shown (e.g. Ben-David, this volume; Bunta et al., 2011; Dinnsen & Barlow, 1998; Ingram, 1974a, 1974b; Jordanidisz, Mohai, Mihály & Winget, this volume; Ferguson & Farewell, 1975; Fikkert, 1994; Kornev & Balčiūnienė, this volume; Levelt, 1994; Macken, 1979; Menn, 1976; Moskowitz, 1971; Smith, 1973; Stampe, 1969; Stemberger, 1989; Stoel-Gammon, 1985; Vihman & Velleman, 2000; Waterson, 1971; Zajdó & Csertán, this volume, etc). Such studies in general have looked into children’s phonologies at different ages, and a large volume of research has centered on deciphering children’s babbling and very early productions (Oller et al., 1976; Sosa, 2017; Sosa & Stoel-Gammon, 2006; Vihman et al., 2008; Vihman & Croft, 2007).

Studying large groups of children, i.e. the Normative Approach, has its foundations in the work of G. Stanley Hall (1846–1924) who together with his student, Arnold Gesell (1880–1961), were influenced by Darwin documenting and measuring in detail all areas related to child development. Slobin’s (1997) publication on L1 acquisition (without a focus on phonology) across many languages has included both case and cross-sectional studies of child language. Interestingly, the children representing Greek in this compilation (Stephany, 1997) were Greek-speaking children being raised in Germany. McLeod’s (2007) volume is an International Guide to Speech Acquisition and presents overviews of phonological acquisition in 36 different languages/varieties, including comprehensive reviews of normative studies cross-linguistically; some of the languages represented are major (English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Spanish, etc.) while others are less common (e.g. Sesotho, Thai, Filipino).

Overall, most work on phonological development has involved major languages. Less frequent is the investigation of under-represented languages such as in research done on Arandic (Turpin et al., 2014), Acoma, Mazateco and Blackfoot (Goad, 2012, 2016), Bantu (Demuth, 2003), Esthonian (Vihman, 1971; Vihman & Vihman, 2011), Farsi (Shooshtaryzadeh, 2017), isiXhosa (Pascoe et al., 2017), isZulu (Pascoe & Jegger, 2019), Mandarin (Xu Rattanasone et al., 2018), Maya (Straight, 1976), Nepali (Benders et al., 2019) Quiche (Pye et al., 1987), Xhosa (Mowrer & Burger, 1991), Valley Zapotec (Stemberger & Chávez-Peón, 2014; this volume), Slovenian (Ozbič et al., 2018), Shona (Mudzingwa, 2010), Swahili and Haiwaian (Blevins, 1995; Demuth, 2008; Piggott, 1999), Tagalog (Chen et al., 2016), Zulu (Demuth & Suzman, 1997), etc.

The normative approach in investigating phonological development is fundamental in that it undertakes the investigation of speech data across a large number of children, thus permitting the identification of universal patterns and the delineation of norms. Such universals and norms are significant for advancing academic insights on language acquisition cross-linguistically but, most importantly, for their potential to act as guidelines to differentiate typical from atypical patterns in language acquisition (e.g. Babatsouli et al., 2017). Accordingly, phonological acquisition theory has the potential to inform practitioners on cases of disorder, impairment or delay (Jakobson, 1941/1968; Ingram, 1987, 1991). In 1981, Pamela Grunwell wrote:

Practitioners especially those whose work is with children experiencing difficulties developing language, cannot afford to follow in a purblind way the theoretical whims of academe. An overzealous adherence to a semantically or a syntactically based remediation program, my lead by default to severely delayed or deviant phonological development; such cases have occurred. In any language development programme, phonology must not be neglected. (Grunwell, 1981: 161)

Grunwell’s argument was not so much against ‘the theoretical whims of academe’ but rather in favor of giving credit to utilizing phonology. This stance is nowadays widely accepted by researchers exploring phonological delay/protraction, impairment, speech sound disorders, as well as impairment affecting speech (e.g. Bernhardt & Stemberger, 2017; Bowen, 2015; Ingram, 1976a, 2015; Locke, 1983; McLeod & Goldstein, 2012; Müller & Ball, 2015; Sosa & Bunta, in press), as well as by researchers working on assessment and intervention (see Baker et al., this volume; Fabiano-Smith, 2019; McLeod & Baker, 2017; Pascoe et al., 2005; Williams et al., 2010, and references therein). Ingram (this volume, In the Spotlight), nevertheless, clearly argues that despite efforts to replace the medical model with a linguistic approach, the ‘Medical Model is alive and well’. Because of the practical repercussions of phonological theory in identifying, assessing, categorizing atypical contexts of child speech productions, the next section will succinctly discuss abstract phonological theories that have impacted the field of child phonological development, and may still play a key role in informing atypical phonologies and intervention methods.

Abstract Theories in Phonological Development

Abstract phonological theory was originally developed for adult speech and applied to child developmental data. The nature of developmental phonology, however, is variable, unsystematic and multiplanar and, as such, any distinct conclusions on phonological abstractness are rendered difficult to reach (Dressler, 1998). The ultimate phonological theory ought to be able to account for all kinds of evidence: first and second language data, adult and child data, universal tendencies, as well as idiosyncrasies (e.g. Babatsouli & Ingram, 2018; Bernhardt & Stemberger, 1998). Child developmental data, therefore, are just as suitable for the advancement of phonological theory as adult synchronic data (Jakobson, 1941/1969). What follows is delineation of major theoretical stances in phonological development.

The Prague Circle

The original theory of sound classification was proposed by the Prague circle of structuralists, namely, linguists N. Trubetskoy (1890–1938) and R. Jakobson (1896–1982). Jakobson (1941/1968) advocated that phonological segments are assessed in terms of sets of distinctive features that catalogue all possible human speech segments in an intricate network of articulatory and acoustic correlates. The notion that individual phonemes are in contrast and opposition with each other was introduced by Trubetskoy (1939) stating that, as every segment may only have one or the other property, there is a binary opposition between two classes of sounds. Jakobson (1941/1968) is the earliest scholar to identify an order in the acquisition of phonology in terms of successive feature contrasts that economizes the analysis of the learning process. As an application of his theoretical postulations, he identified articulatory stages in phonol...