PHONEMES AND PHONOLOGICAL PROCESSES

Once the minimum vocabulary is acquired because it’s very difficult to communicate successfully with variable pronunciations of all words, children adopt strategy used in nature adult phonological systems: they represent words in phonemes.

Children speech at this stage is also distinguished from that of adults because phonological processes are used in different ways. As we have seen, adults’ speech is full assimilations, deletions, metatheses, and so on. Child speech simply has more of these. Secondly, children speech exhibits a greater variety of processes than does the speech of the adults in their home environments. Yet children learning English as their native language device final consonants as well, as the examples below indicate: pig (bik), bib (bIp), egg (  k).

Because processes in children’s speech are very predictable, the following generalizations can be made:

Processes are universal. Roughly the same processes are found in all child speech, regardless of the adult language the child is learning. It means that however phonological development is eventually explained, it must be attributed to learning strategies which are more complex than imitation. Indeed, children must sometimes unlearn certain processes.

 Children start with a large number of processes eliminating them as adult pronunciation is achieved. Of the processes mentioned above, assimilation are more widespread in child speech than in adult speech but the substitutions like those mentioned above must be eliminated entirely, since they don’t exist in normal adult speech at all.

Source: Dr. Sujoko, MA. Psycholinguistics Module: UNS