Phonetics and Language Acquisition

Language, 2014

2021

Phonetics - the study and classification of speech sounds - is a major sub-discipline of linguistics. Bringing together a team of internationally renowned phoneticians, this handbook provides comprehensive coverage of the most recent, cutting-edge work in the field, and focuses on the most widely-debated contemporary issues. Chapters are divided into five thematic areas: segmental production, prosodic production, measuring speech, audition and perception, and applications of phonetics. Each chapter presents an historical overview of the area, along with critical issues, current research and advice on the best practice for teaching phonetics to undergraduates. It brings together global perspectives, and includes examples from a wide range of languages, allowing readers to extend their knowledge beyond English. By providing both state-of-the-art research information, and an appreciation of how it can be shared with students, this handbook is essential both for academic phoneticians, a...

Modern Language Journal, 2009

A practical course English Phonetics and Phonology: A practical course by Peter Roach has been a leading coursebook on English pronunciation for twenty-five years. It presents the basic theoretical material needed to understand phonetics, phonology and the pronunciation of English in the form of a 02-unit course. Each unit ends with notes on issues that deserve further study and recommendations for further reading, as well as notes for teachers and written exercises. In addition, there are audio exercises for every chapter of the course on the two accompanying CDs. The new edition adds to this a website with additional written and spoken exercises, as well as a wealth of other material offering a wider perspective on the subject.

2010

This volume is aimed at introductory level students of English phonetics and phonology. Presupposing no previous knowledge of either phonetics or phonology, it introduces the subject with a minimum of technical terminology.

Journal of Linguistics, 1997

Reviewed by P D, University of Hawai'i at Ma, noa Recent interest in language learnability has prompted interaction between acquisition studies and syntactic theory ; Phonological acquisition and phonological theory aims to provide a similar interchange between acquisition studies and phonology. It includes nine chapters, plus a preface and introduction by the editor, a unified author index, and a subject index. The volume is attractively printed, and it is generally free from typographical errors." The authors share a clear idea of what the object of phonological acquisition is ; their theoretical framework is that of generative phonology, with a focus on autosegmental, featuregeometric, underspecified, and prosodic representations. The volume is a much-needed attempt to interrelate the representations of modern phonological theory, the principles and parameters approach to acquisition, and the problems encountered by a child acquiring a first-language phonology, but the chapters reveal some difficulties in achieving the desired synthesis. John Archibald's introduction describes phonology as a system of interconnected levels of representation which also includes processes that map one type of representation onto another. His emphasis on representations and his view of phonology as a system entirely independent of phonetics are consistent with the rest of the volume. Elan Dresher & Harry van der Hulst discuss ' global determinacy '-their term for the cases where a single phonetic form corresponds to multiple possible phonological representations and a ' global ' knowledge of the language is required to determine a phonological representation. They cite various sources of global determinacy in modern phonological theory, including abstract underlying representations, floating material, underspecification, and variable grouping and dependency. These are problems of learnability ' because a lot must be known about the phonology of specific languages in order to determine which representation is adequate ' (). They note that much modern phonology assumes that the main burden of explanation rests with representations, not rules, and that the rules should follow from the segmental inventory, and they add that other hypotheses are implied : that representations can be established before any rules have been learned, and that representations increase in complexity by adding contrast. Dresher and van der Hulst formulate questions of learnability which phonological analyses should answer, but they offer no solutions here. The authors who deal with segmental acquisition (Keren Rice & Peter Avery, David Ingram, E. Jane Fee, Daniel A. Dinnsen & Steven B. Chin) almost uniformly attribute children's production errors to limitations on their phonological representations. However, they do not reconcile these limited representations with children's perceptual accuracy, or interpret what this accuracy implies about children's phonologies. Some of the authors (like Rice & Avery) disregard this problem ; others (Dinnsen & Chin) take it seriously. Most assume that adults' and children's phonological representations are underspecified, but none actually present any evidence from acquisition data for underspecification. In particular, no evidence is provided for the sorts of perceptual confusion that underspecification would be expected to cause. Underspecification is accepted here despite the fact that it makes incorrect predictions about children's perceptual abilities, differential phonological effects of sounds that children pronounce the same, and the nature of changes in children's productions. A child with representations which lack information regarding Place, for example, should fail to distinguish tea from key perceptually, but does not. Identical (underspecified) representations should not be treated differently by phonological rules, but they often are treated differently. And correction of an error pattern should correct inappropriate forms as well as the appropriate forms if their [] One surprising error, however, () involves ' McCawley () following Hayes … , p. ) ' in his definition of the mora-when, of course, it is Hayes who followed McCawley.     underlying representations do not differ, but this rarely happens (for example, in a child who says [t] for adult [k], [t] and [k] are both supposedly unspecified for Place, but when the child learns to pronounce velars, only the adult-[k] words change to [k]). These indications regarding children's representations have been pointed out repeatedly (Stampe , , Smith , Barton , etc.). Daniel A. Dinnsen & Steven B. Chin are to be credited for recognizing and describing these problems. But, having criticized underspecification, Dinnsen & Chin make a surprising attempt to save it with a theory of ' shadow specification '. They say that, for any merged pair (or series), the segments the child produces correctly are specified for the distinguishing feature, and the segments the child produces incorrectly are ' shadow ' specified for the distinguishing feature (for example [t] is unspecified for Place, and [k] is specified for Place as [Coronal]). This proposal is hard to swallow : the child's feature specification reflects his or her own pronunciation,      . That is, the child is said to specify a segment as coronal only when he or she knows it to be -coronal. Further, no basis is provided for the regularity of children's mispronunciations-since they are not determined by universal processes or by redundancy rules, we still need an explanation of the fact that a child specifies adult velars  as coronals, and not randomly as coronals, labials, glottals, etc. The proposal also predicts that a child who produces a three-way merger (such as [t] for [p, t, k] or [t] for [t, H, s] would mark both ' erroneous ' segments with the same wrong feature ([Coronal] or [kContinuant], respectively). When a new articulation is required, a change rule that affected the mis-specified segments would necessarily change them all to the newly acquired sound-which does not always happen. When the only proposal in the volume which confronts the problems of underspecification has these effects, one may well look again at a possibility Dinnsen & Chin reject : that the child's underlying forms are accurately specified and that articulatory constraints cause substitutions that prevent their accurate realization. Prosodic and tonal issues are not neglected : Jane Fee provides a discussion of how UG rules for building melodic and prosodic structures may dictate the shape of children's early productions, John Archibald surveys the acquisition of stress in first and second languages, focusing on whether stress is learned lexically or by rule and whether there are default parameter settings regarding foot type, extrametricality, etc., and Katherine Demuth presents a case study of the acquisition of some morphologically conditioned tone rules in Sesotho. Both Fee and Archibald propose a bisyllabic trochee as the unmarked metrical unit, instead of a bimoraic trochee, on the grounds that open syllables are more common in many children's productions ; neither considers early monosyllables with long vowels as potential evidence for a bimoraic unit. On the second-language acquisition front, Ellen Broselow and Hye-Bae Park present an interesting analysis of vowel epenthesis in the Korean pronunciation of English words, which considers Korean speakers' perception and production in terms of parameter settings, and Thomas Scovel offers a chapter on the discrimination of foreign accents. The learnability questions that Dresher & van der Hulst raise, and the objections to underspecification outlined by Dinnsen & Chin are important problems for phonological theory and for acquisition, and it is not clear how they can be resolved. Questions about the relationship between perception and representation-how a phonetic signal is processed into a phonological representation-go unanswered (Rice & Avery) or are insufficiently answered (Ingram, Archibald). And important aspects of the relationship between phonological representation and production are glossed over (as in Fee's claim that although phonology constrains production, ' lexically learned ' forms may be produced which violate UG constraints on phonological form ()). Through much of the volume, there is an assumption (stated most clearly by Ingram ()) that the principles that govern the acquisition of phonology should be the same as those which govern the acquisition of syntax. Some learning principles may, of course, be common to both, but this assumption overlooks the more direct relation of phonology to the learner's perception and production abilities-to phonetics. The authors hold the learner's phonological system responsible for his production errors, but the features, representations, prosodic structures, and rules of this system are unconnected to their phonetic realizations, where many of the learner's difficulties lie. Default parameter settings and the redundancy rules for default feature specification are simply attributed to UG, as if no articulatory or perceptual explanation were involved. Phonetic inabilities (absence of particular phonetic skills) are not even considered as a potential source of negative phonological constraints. This isolation of phonology from phonetics is assumed without discussion. Phonological theory and studies of language acquisition often seem unconnected ; this book    works from the phonology side to bridge that gap. Most of the chapters are attempts to show how the segmental, prosodic or tonal systems of a current model of phonology can be acquired. The attempt is welcome, but the bridge is incomplete ; many difficulties regarding the connection remain.

All rights reserved, including the right to translate or to reproduce this book or parts thereof in any form 1) English Studies, XXXIX (1958), pp. 97-110. 2) P. Strevens, Spoken Language, London 1956.

This outstanding multi-volume series covers all the major subdisciplines within linguistics today and, when complete, will offer a comprehensive survey of linguistics as a whole.

Michael Olayinka Gbadegesin, 2019

The aim of this chapter is to expose the students to the English sound system in order to improve their spoken English. The chapterintroduces the learners to phonetics and phonology. It presents organs of speech briefly and focuses on the segmental features -English vowel and consonant sounds; their articulation, symbols and classifications. Though the expression of language can either be spoken or written, the spoken form is primary therefore, it forms the basis for the written form. This is evident in the fact that some languages, in spite of their functionality in their respective speech communities, have not developed orthography for their written form. Phonetics and Phonology are the branches of linguistics that study the sound production and sound combinations. Phonetics and Phonology are two different but related concepts. Though there are profound differences between them, there are also some areas of overlapping. Therefore, it is sometimes very difficult for many students to differentiate between the two concepts.

2016

A small paper discussing phonetics.