Please note special day; Tuesday 2/17 follows a Monday schedule
Speaker: Tara McAllister
Title: Articulatory and Perceptual Factors in a Child-Specific Error Process
Time: Tues 2/17, 5pm
Location: 32-D831
> Several commonly observed processes in child speech lack counterparts in adult phonologies. Particularly problematic are child processes of neutralization in prosodically strong positions, which contravene our
understanding of positional neutralization as a phonetically motivated process governed by the relative
strength of perceptual cues. Previous analyses have implicated both child-specific patterns of perception
(Dinnsen & Farris-Trimble, 2008) and limitations of the immature articulatory apparatus (Inkelas & Rose,
2008) as the source of this reversal of the adult pattern. I will evaluate the evidence for child-specific
perceptual and articulatory factors in an experimental investigation of one child’s pattern of velar
fronting in strong position. It will be shown that this child exhibited an adult-like perceptual advantage
for contrasts in word-initial position. This suggests that articulatory rather than perceptual factors are
responsible for his pattern of neutralization in strong position. Acoustic data from neutralized /d/ and
/g/ tokens will also be presented to extend our understanding of articulatory factors that contribute to
the process of velar fronting.