Gestures , Features and Segments in Early Child Speech *

Alphabetic orthographies represent speech at the level ofthe phoneme. Yet the definition and functional status of the phonemic segment are widely viewed as problematic. Studies of child phonology have shown that the initial domain of a child's articulatory organization is the word rather than the segment, and have attributed a child's errors to failure to organize the features of a target word. The paper rejects the feature, as a unit of articulatory organization, on both rational and empirical grounds, proposing in its stead the gesture. Evidence from a child (1;9-2;1) learning American English shows how deviant forms, puzzling for a featural account, are readily explained as errors in the execution and timing of gestures. Phoneme-sized phonetic segments are then viewed as emergent properties of the gestural routines from which the child constructs its lexicon.