TOWARDS ADULT PRONUNCIATION

From this point until adult pronunciation is achieved at the approximate age of 4 or 5 children’s phonological systems are constantly changing, as they bring their use of processes in line with that of the adults around them.

One compelling observation is that children can recognize their own mispronunciations. Secondly, children know more that they can say. Many children have identical pronunciations for different words, like bik for big or beak, yet able to recognize them as different words when adults say them. Finally, many ‘difficult sounds’ appear in unexpected places in children’s speech. What seems to be happening is that the child is not simply learning sounds in any order of articulatory difficulty, but is developing a system for pronouncing the phonemes of his language at this stage; the child’s phonological system contains a process which devoices stops at the ends of words. But since this process is not part of the adult system, he will eventually abandon it. 

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

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

 
                                                                                                            

First Words

The next major task in the acquisition of phonology involves understanding the words as a link between sound and meaning. The first, children acquire the concept of a word at the approximate age of 12-16 months. These first words show tremendous variability in pronunciation. Some may be perfect adults pronunciations, others may be so distorted that they are comprehensible only to the child’s closest companions. Still vary considerable in their pronunciation from one occasion to the next. Because of this instability, psychologists have come to believe that children do not show an understanding of phonemes in their first words.

                                                                                                                      

Babbling

At the six months, normal children in all cultures begin to babble, producing long sequences of vowels and consonants. Babbling resemble adult language in a number of important respects.

Psycholinguistic and linguists have concluded that babbling has at least two functions, there are:

Babbling serves primarily as practice for later speech. This is intuitively plausible because the fine motor movements necessary for accurate articulation are exercised extensively during babbling indeed, babbling children produce a greater variety of sounds.

Children babble for social reward. According to some psychologists, babbling is the child’s first experienced with the social character of language. Evidence for the importance of the social factor in babbling comes from the study of severely neglected children.

According to one hypothesis, children babble because language development involves a process of biological maturation. Thus babbling occurs automatically when the relevant structure in the brain reach a critical level of development.  

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