Children's Acquisition of Phonology: The Learning of Acoustic Stimuli?

EDRS Price MF-$0.25 HC-$0.85 *Articulation (Speech), Auditory Perception, *Aural Stimuli, *Child Language, Phonemes, *Phonology, *Psycholinguistics, Psychological Tests, Statistical Analysis This paper takes issue with the position that children's phoneme acquisition schedule is dictated primarily by auditory perceptual factors and suggests the alternative position that ease of production accounts for age of acquisition. It is felt that perceptual theory cannot adequately explain phonological development, e.g. three year -olds produce certain sounds which they will not accurately perceive until much later and vice versa. Three psychological scaling tests are described in which adults were asked to designate certain phonemes as harder or easier to produce. These judgments were compared with the phonemes acquired by three-year-olds. A highly significant correlation between the adult ratings and children's phoneme acquisition was found. Featural analysis tended to support the hypothesis, and further confirmation was seen in the patterning of articulatory errors among children. The author stresses that these findings do not negate the importance of perceptual factors, emphasizing that he is trying to explain not the dynamics of phoneme acquisition but rather the schedule which it follows. It is, however, emphasized that there is no compelling evidence for perceptual theory, and certain observations which either militate against perceptual theory or encourage alternative speculation are discussed. (FWB) U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH. EDUCATION & WELFARE OFFICE OF EDUCATION THIS DOCUMENT HAS BEEN REPRODUCED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED FROM THE PERSON OR ORGANIZATION ORIGINATING IT. POINTS OF VIEW OR OPINIONS STATED DO NOT NECES SAR!LY REPRESENT OFFICIAL OFFICE OF EDU CAT' 1N POSITION OR POLICY 1969-70 CHILDREN'S RESEARCH CENTER ROBERT L. SPRAGUE, DIRECTOR BISHOP, DOYLE, Ph.D., U. of III., 1967. Motor performance and play. 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Treatment of children in public school classrooms; parent-child interaction. WERRY, JOHN S., M. D., U. New Zealand, 1955. Consulting Child Psychiatrist. Child Psychiatry. Psychopharmacology of children; behavior modification; brain behavior relationships. 1 Children's Acquisition of Phonology: The Learning of Acoustic Stimuli? John L. Locke Children's Research Center University of Illinois Champaign, Illinois Some previous papers have suggested that children's phoneme acquisition schedule is dictated primarily by auditory perceptual factors. Olmstead's theory (1966), for example: " . . . predicts learning, measured by correct pronunciation of phones, as a function of ease of perception. The general prediction is that more discriminable phones are learned earlier andthe less discriminable ones later." The problem with perceptual theory is that it does not adequately ex lain phonological development. For example, three-year-olds produce certain sounds which they will not accurately perceive until much later; conversely, they perceive accurately some phonemes which they will not acquire for several years. So one is compelled to look for viable alternative constructs, and is confronted with the motor-response side of the question. We know something about perceptual ease, but what is the ease of phoneme production? To those who have equated "early" and "late" with "easy" and "difficult" the question may seem absurd, but age of acquisition' and ease of production are not identical, and in this paper we asked whether the latter could account for the former. To get at this matter of motoric ease we designed three psychological scaling tasks in which naive, normal-speaking, native-English adults attempted to introspect and estimate the muscular tensions in their vocal tract during