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.