Idioms in phonology acquisition and phonological change

Journal of Phonetics (1980) 8, 69-83

Idioms in phonology acquisition and phonological change Breyne Arlene Moskowitz Linguistics Dep t. Unive rsity of Califo rnia Los Angeles, 405 Hilgard Ave., U.S.A. 90024 Received 30th June 197 8

Abstract :

The speech of children includes not only regularly formed utterances which exhibit the phonological structure which has been acquired , but also idiomatic utterances which deviate in interesting ways from that structure. Among children's idioms are those which are progressive (which superficially manifest phonetic dexterit y far greater than that of the child 's regular speech and simultaneously are more primitive phonologically) and those which are regressive (which are both phonologically and phonetically more primitive than regular speech). Progressive idioms have important implications for the structure of a theory of phonology acquisition, and dramatically emphasize the distinction between the acquisition processes relevant to phonology versus those relevant to phonetics , and the conflicts between those processes. A model of phonology acquisition within which phonetics acquisition can be explained is summarized, and it is argued that idioms need to be identified among the data of child speech before an accurate grammatical analysis can be performed . Regressive idioms appear to be exempt from phonological changes affecting the bulk of the lexicon, and this exemption results from their aberrant phonological encoding. Both idiolectal and dialectal regressive idioms occur in adult language also. Perhaps the most elaborate dialectal idiom systems are the ideophones of some African languages. A categorization of the kinds of phonological changes which occur during the acquisition period leads to some parallels between the mechanisms of change in children and adults and lends support to the lexical diffusion theory of diachronic change which has been proposed by Wang. Evidence relating to the different neurophysiological encoding of regular· vs. idomatic speech suggests some possible causes of the differential vulnerability of distinct lexical items to phonological change.

Idioms in phonology acquisition and phonological change

(1) Paul had been quiet for the first half hour of my session with him that day and finally I turned off the tape recorder. The-18-month old child was looking at a book, and he spotted a picture of a glass of orange juice. Clearly and distinctly , Paul said "orange juice". Since the total vocabulary I had observed during previous visits included approximately two dozen items, all of the form CV or reduplications of a CV syllable , the utterance "orange juice" seemed dramatic and almost unbelievable . I turned on the recorder and asked Paul to " say that again". He cooperated, and repeated it, but this time he pronounced it [du] , and for 0095-44 7 0/80/01 00069+ 15 $02.00/0

© 1980 Academic Press Inc. (London) Ltd.

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several months after, Paul's pronunciation of "orange juice" remained [du] . That was the first time that I noticed a phenomenon which I will label as a Phonological idiom. A phonological idiom can be defined preliminarily as a form which does not obey the pronunciation constraints that otherwise operate on the speaker's output. Phonological idioms are relatively common in children's speech, and many examples have been collected since Paul first said "orange juice" . This paper reviews some of those examples and argues that the constraints which are violated are phonological rather than phonetic. It also makes several related claims about the nature of phonology acquisition and the mechanisms of phonological change . Jakob son (1968 :p.23) noted that "One often secures "parrot-like" repetitions of single sounds and syllables from children , even though the very same sounds continue to be absent where they talk spontaneuosly ." During the early stages of post-babbling acquisition children indeed sometimes imitate fairly long sound sequences with remarkable phonetic accuracy even though their spontaneous speech is entirely limited to single and reduplicated CV syllables. Such imitations provide evidence that a child's phonetic repertoire is more extensive than is usually indicated by her limited vocabulary. This difference between the child's total phonetic ability and her typical phonetic productions is caused by the phonological constraints on the phonetic shapes of regular vocabulary items. Phonological idioms are not imitations, and are by definition always spontaneuosly produced . like the rules of the child's own grammar at a given point in time , idioms are created by the individual and reflect some aspect of her language-producing ability. On the other hand, like imitations , they seem to be exempt from the phonological constraints of the child's sound system , and they demonstrate a wider-ranging phonetic ability than is traditionally attributed to children in the early stages of language acquisition . Thus the existence of idioms also supports the dichotomy between phonetics and phonology in acquisition ; I am claiming in this paper that the learning of phonetics and of phonology are distinct processes, with different goals , and often produce conflicting constraints on the child's output. (See also Moskowitz 1975). In this paper I use the term "phonology" to refer to the abstract mental representation of the sound system which learners of the language must construct inside their heads ; "phonetics" refers to the concrete information the learner gathers about the physiological productions of the vocal tract and the acoustic results of such productions. (2) Examples of phonological idioms can be classified in several useful ways. Many idioms superficially demonstrate phonetic dexterity not yet incorporated into the phonologically constrained regular utterances. These will be termed Progressive idioms, and they can be further subdivided into the categories of Immediate, Perseverant, and Onomatopoeic progressive idioms. The example given earlier of the utterance "orange juice" is an Immediate progressive idiom . Immediate idioms typically occur one or two or three times, within usually a very short span. of time. Immediate idioms are always rapidly replaced by another pronunciation for the' same lexical item , a simpler pronunciation which falls within the constraints of the child's phonological system. Roger, another child in my sample , was at the same CV and reduplicated CV stage as Paul. He produced an "excellent" adult-like rendition of "pencil" twice; much to his mother's consternation , Roger then "regressed" to [phs]. What his mother viewed as a regression is , of course, here viewed as an advance from an idiomatic , phonetic, to a phonological version of the lexical item. Leopold (1939- 49) reports that Hildgard 's first attempt at the word "danke shon" ("thank you") was [?al]k-f) , dnd was immediately replaced by the stable form [~<;~<;], clearly in its earlier rendition an immediate phonological idiom. Two other words in Hildegard's speech which exhibited more complex derivations from an initial idiomatic form to a stable form were "baby" and "tick-tock" . At l ;2 she produced "baby" once as [be-bi] the hyphen signifying a separation between the two syllables).

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Leopold indicated that the word was produced correctly , clearly, and distinctly. Hildegard immediately "reduced" the word to [baba]. "Tick-tock" first occurred during O;II as [tak] once , then as [t~ktl!k] once; a simple double click sufficed subsequently. But Hildegard was very interested in the word and the objects it described, and it was destined to develop several alternating forms during I; O(including [tha] and [th-th]), one of which was progressively idiomatic ([tht-tha]). That the syllables ~f this idiom were distinctly separate qualifies the idiomaticity somewhat, for the juxtaposition of two different syllables is different from their actual incorporation into a single disyllabic word. Perseverant progressive idioms differ from the previous type only in that they persist for long periods of time before being replaced by phonolgically regular forms. An example comes from Leopold 's diary (op. cit.). At 0 ; 8 , with few "wo rds" in her lexicon, Hildegard's syllable structure was exclusively CV , with frequent reduplication. She acquired a new word, "pretty" , in the form [pr gti]. The word was a favorite of hers and was used with great frequency. It continued to be pronounced in this way for a year, and then was 'reduced' to a phonetically simpler [ptti] . The latter was fully grammatical - i.e. within the constraints of her phonology - when it was first produced at I ; 8. The [pr ;Jti] form, however, had deviated markedly from Hildegard's systematic pronunciations during its entire year-long tenure within her vocabulary . Welmers (pers. comm .) noted an interesting set of perseverant idioms in the speech of his son . At 0 ; 8 the child "correctly" (i.e . as they occur phonetically in the speech of adults) produced the words "clock" and "truck", and continued to do until I ;2, when he suddenly " revised" both words to [kak] . It was not until several weeks later that he began again producing a distinction between the two words , as [kak] and [tak] . Grekoff (n .d.) has reported some interesting data on the speech of a boy, Nicky , during the twentieth month . Nicky 's words were all one or two syllables long , and were primarily CV or reduplicated CVCV types. Except for a [k] ~ [kw] alternation which occurred freely in several words , all forms were quite stable phonetically. In addition, two words in the child's lexicon were idioms. One was "a demonstrative 'what's that?" , which was "highly unstable ": it occurred in several forms, [sata] ~ [s;Jta] ~ (s;JS;Jsa] ~ [has;JS;J]. Both this and the other idiom , tikatika, "tickle, tickle", are the only words which were ever more than two syllables in length , and bo th were less stable than other words. Neither ever occurred twice in the same form. The latter is described as "phonetics uncertain , articulation extremely rapid. Actually recorded in the shapes [ktikatika] and [tikatka]." Onomatopoeic idioms are pronunciations based on environmental sounds rather than on a linguistic model. Two examples of onomatopoeic idioms come from the diary studies of Lindner (I898) and Leopold (op. cit.). Lindner's son, learning to speak German, produced the form [m:::] to indicate the approaching presence of a carriage on the cobblestone street below his window long before he produced [ m] in his spontaneous rule-governed utterances . Hildegard , who included only [f] and [x] as fricatives in her regular syllable inventory, used [s: :: ] as the name for a teapot. R egressive idioms contrast with progressive ones by exhibiting less phonetic complexity than the observe r would expect on the basis of the child's other productions. For example , Erica at 2; 0 produced sentences up to eight morphemes in length; words of up to five syllables; and acceptable phonetic versions of almost all English consonants, including /r/ in all words for which the adult model had / r/ except her own name. Thus Erica said [mJr str5beri:z] "more strawberries" but [a:ka] "Erica". As would be expected at her advanced stage of acquisition , she also pronounced all words with initial /d/ correctly, except for the idiomatic "dog" and "duck" ([gJg] and [gAk]) . Mackie (2; 4) also produced multiword sentences and multisyllabic words, and seemed reasonably advanced in sound system development , producing many consonant clusters. The word for "daddy" occurred a total of 24 times in a 232-utterance corpus (Albright

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& Albright, 1956). Curiously , only twice did it have a medial [d] ; otherwise it was similar to [da:i]. Debby pronounced "pacifier" as [pabpaka], a rather elaborate reduplication, from quite early in her development. At age 3; 2, with a more advanced phonology , she retained that form but also introduced a competing one which was phonetically very similar to the model. Discourses with Debby from then on suggested her awareness of the interchangability of the two forms . She reserved for herself the right to use the regressive idiomatic form and insisted that adults pronounce the word in the standard way (Krashen, per. comm.). Regressive idioms appear to be fossilized forms, relics of an earlier stage of acquisition , forms which have been omitted from the domain of a change which the child's phonological system has undergone. As in the case of Debby's two forms of "pacifier", regressive idioms sometimes co-exist with more advanced versions of the same items. Some hypotheses will be discussed in a later section regarding the sources of regressive idioms in children's phonological development. The existence of regressive idioms seems to parallel the residue items in adult speech which result from competing diachronic changes. Thus an understanding of this mechanism may provide insights into the role of language acquisition and use in the processes of change. The causes and mechanisms of this omission will also be considered in a later section. ----.ciTOms occur with considerable frequency in the speech of young children; their existence must be taken into account before the linguist can isolate the data which must form a basis for the writing of rules to describe the regular speech of a child . A grammar for Paul at 18 months, for example , would ascribe too much linguistic knowledge to the child if it atempted to include his first production of "orange juice". Similarly, a grammar which could predict [prati] as a possible regular form for Hildegard from 0; 8 to I ; 8 would grossly exaggerate her systematic knowledge of phonology during that period. Taken as a group, idiomatic utterances are an important source of evidence for a number of different aspects of an adequate model of phonology acquisition. Later in this paper I will claim that they also provide a link between the processes of acquisition and those of change. (3) In the speech of both children and adults there are two major classes of idioms, Idiolectal and Dialectal. All of the examples given in the previous section are idiolectal. Dialectal idioms, on the other hand, are lexical items which are shared by a number of speakers and which deviate from the collective shared grammar of those speakers. Infants do not create these forms anew for themselves, the way they do create idiolectal idioms , but rather they learn them as deviant forms. For example, members of my family pronounce the name of one family member as [rfth a] although we all use the more usual [rL:a ] in reference to other individuals whose names are also spelled "Rita". Similarly, but on a larger scale, many English-speaking adults who have no knowledge of German or French pronounce one or two words which have been assimilated into English with the "correct" phonetics of the original language , e.g. "Bach" with [x] or "bon voyage" with [o] . Several African languages include a rich .and important category of dialectal idioms , known as /deophones. The precise status of tllese forms in most African languages has not been well-documented ; although more attention has been devoted to them recently, and an excellent summary of the current knowledge is given by Welmers (1972 :p.929). According to Welmers, "Everyone seems to recognize that some words are ideophones, but no one finds it easy to define an ideophone with any precision." some languages severely delimit the grammatical classes to which ideophonic words can belong, while others include ideophonic foms in a number of word classes. To some extent, morphological, semantic, and phonological criteria are all relevant, but in different combinations in different languages. Ideophones are sometimes claimed to be onomatopoeic, although the adequacy of the intended imitation is often questionable, just as it is in what has been called onomatopoeia in English and in children's idioms. It has also been claimed that new ideophones are

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invented spontaneously by speakers, although Welrners denies that this is true. It apparently is true, however, that in some languages, the linguist can write a sort of phonological subroutine, which differs from the set of normal phonological rules, and which is applied only to the relatively open class of ideophone~. According to Welmers (op. cit. : pp. 934-5), "It has been noted for some languages that ideophones are frequently phonologically anomalous. They may contain phonemes not found in other types of words, or unique sequences of phonemes, and they may be aberrant in respect to the rules of tone that apply to them." In the examples of ideophones I am familiar with, I have noted a high frequency of reduplication of syllables. To what extent this observation is generally valid I do not know. However, it is worth noting that reduplication plays an important role in phonology in at least two other areas: as an early manifestation of syllable-based phonology in acquisition [as discussed in (4)], and as one of several devices employed in (adult) baby talk (addressed to children) as a simplification procedure. (The latter is undoubtedly due to the former, and not vice-versa. See Ferguson 1964). Whether these child language occurrences of reduplication are in any way related to ideophonic occurrences is an area of speculation. Examples of ideophones are given by Welmers for several African languages, and by Courtenay (1968) for Yoruba. Some ideophones have been noted to occur uniquely and necessarily with certain paralinguistic phenomena, such as hand-clapping. Perhaps coincidentally, paralinguistic phenomena also are frequently associated with particular speech forms or word games addressed to children. Dialectal idioms similar to ideophones occur in English also, although in less profusion. Forms such as [ t1-] (a scolding sound, usually written "tsk, tsk") and [7~7~:] (the stylized "no" , usually written "uh-uh") are easy to find. Welmers also cites other forms in English which to some extent have parallel characteristics to African ideophones, such as: (i) onomatopoeic forms similar to lexical items (such as "bang-bang", "arf', "meow", "moo", but pronounced with particular non-segmental and/or paralinguistic phenomena which do not ordinarily occur in English phonology, e.g., "moo" produced with creaky voice and an extremely long vowel; (ii) partially reduplicated forms, e.g. "willy-nilly", "hum-drum", "teeny-weeny", etc, (Partial reduplication is also an important device in phonology acquisition); (iii) the recurring partial reduplication with [t] ~ [re] vowel changes, e.g. "flim-flam", "chit-chat", "pitter-patter", "riff-raff', etc. Categories (ii) and (iii) probably should not be considered "idiomatic" in English, although they well illustrate Weimer's point. Dialectal idioms are undoubtedly fossilized forms. Ideophones are only marginally productive in those African languages in which they occur. The remainder of this paper will be devoted to a discussion of the more productive idiolectal idioms in children's speech. (4) It is necessary to digress here to summarize the mode1 of phonology acquisition within which idioms can be defined. A more complete statement of this model is presented in Moskowitz 1971. In the summary presented here, many statements are made without sufficient substantiation. The reader is referred to the more extensive evidence and argumentation presented in the fuller statement of the model. model. This model assumes that the child does not have any innate knowledge of the structure of the language. Not even information about the Structural units on the basis of which language information is encoded is assumed to be pre-programmed into the human brain. One of the numerous tasks of language acquisition is the discovery of these abstract units (e.g. segment, distinctive feature, syllable, etc,) in which systematic information about the language's structure can or must be encoded. The acquisition of phonology, as opposed to phonetics, involves the creation of a representation in the mind of the learner. The acoustic signal of adult speech is all the information available to the child on which to base language learning. It is the output of the adult grammar, and the input to the child's own grammar construction mechanism. Thus these

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abstract units are discovered in the earliest stages through examination of the acoustic signals in the environment and later by re-examination of those same acoustic signals as well as examination of the learner's own productions as they filter through that learner's own phonological pro cesser , whose organization is based on whatever phonological units have been acquired. Acquisition of the sound system thus proceeds as the child discovers a succession of progressively more abstract units on the basis of which she can systematize the structure of her phonology. At the same time , the child must learn to manipulate app ropriately all of the non-
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contrasts precede syntagmatic ones. Two different distinctive features, for example, first contrast paradigmatically , As the stage proceeds, the contrast develops into a syntagmatic one . A by-product of that change in the status of the contrast is that the child's linguistic organization is set up to maximize the possibility of discovering the next more abstract phonological unit. As an example of this process at work , let us begin in the early syllable stage. A typical (but not exclusive) pattern is for the child to produce syllables which have the internal phonetic pattern CV, and to produce words which consist either of one syllable or of two identical syllables. We can refer to this as the reduplication stage. A child following this typical pattern might have lexical items such as [kiki], [tu], [?a?a] , [papa], [pipi], [ka]. Lexical items of the reduplicated form seem to be phonetically more stable: the pronunciation of the syllable does not vary much from one production to another. Greater variation often does occur in the pronunciation of a syllable which is not reduplicated . Beginning at 0 ; 8 Hildegard (Leopold , op. cit.) used a word to address dogs which varied in pronunciation from [?~] to [?a], but at I; 0 stabilized as the reduplicated form [?a?a]. Reduplication seems to function as a vehicle for the learner to discover how much phonetic

variation can be tolerated between two different instances of the same phonological unit (syllable) . During the reduplication period two different syllables can only contrast paradigmatically , and all syntagmatic variation is sub-phonological. In this situation the child appears to be searching for minimal sameness. The processes of phonology acquisition are deeply involved in this changing status of contrast within the system. When any phonological unit becomes available for syntagmatic contrast (where it had been used only for paradigmatic contrast before) the child's entire lexicon is suddenly open to revision of its output forms . This revision proceeds slowly, and it allows the child to discover a new unit with which to organize the phonology . Thus by the time the pronunciation revisions are well under way , the emerging forms which syntagmatically contrast two different types of the same unit , also , incidentally, paradigmatically contrast two different types of another unit. By examining her own output the child can discover this other unit. Reduplication is followed by the stage of partial reduplication, during which the child juxtaposes two syllables of the CV type which are partly same and partly different, e.g. in kiti or babi. Partial reduplication allows for a reverse discovery : how much phonetic

similarity can be tolerated between instances of two different phonological (syllable) units. In this situation the child appears to be searching for minimal difference. It is this vehicle which is used initially to discover the distinctive feature units of the model language. Distinct syllables , which previously were only contrasted paradigmatically, can now be contrasted syntagmatically . This leaves an empty slot, in effect - the possibility of paradigmatic contrast on another level. There is a definite period in the development of most children during which the only syllables which are syntagmatically contrasted are those which incorporate those phonetic distinctions of language which occur earliest in the Jakobson distinctive feature hierarchy (Jakobson , 1968). It is interesting to note that the regularity of distinctive feature acquisition in children's speech production is greater when the data of this period are considered rather than the period of earliest word acquisition. The explanation lies in the fact that during the earlier period the order of appearance of sounds is determined partly by accidental preferences for particular lexical items. By isolating in a partial reduplication a minimal phonetic contrast, such as that between the vowels (a] and [i] in babi , the child can not only derive an abstract distinctive feature as a unit of his phonology but also is finally able to begin making judgments about the location of such features in the stream of speech. Initially , such judgments take the form of locating the feature as occurring at the onset or in the nucleus of the syllable. Through the vehicle of partial reduplication the child is able to make these judgments without having to postulate an artificial point in the syllable at which to locate a division between. the onset and the

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nucleus. This last abstraction, the location of a dividing point, is more artificial than the others in that there is no real and consistent physical (acoustic or articulatory) basis for it. The adoption of the segment as a minimal phonological unit is the ultimate result. The data quoted in Burling's (1959) diary article do not, unfortunately , comprise a complete lexicon , but they provide a fine illustration of the processes of reduplication and partial reduplication. At I ; 4, the child had "twelve or so" words, all of the CV or reduplicated CVCV types (e.g. rna, kiki, tu). At I; 5, he learned suddenly and decisively to use two different consonants", (italics mine), as exemplified by kiti (from kiki) and babi. Within the theory of phonology with which Burling was working, this development at I; 5 revealed no increase in the child's knowledge whatsoever : the lexicon at I ; 4 evidenced that the child "knew" the "phonemes" /p t k m n a i u/, and this decisive step on Stephen's part at I ; 5 involved no new phonemes. (Precisely that it did not utilize new "phonemes" is significant , for the child does not appear to tackle several problems at once, and what would have appeared as a new "phoneme" would really have been an achievement in the realm of phonetic realizations of phonological units.) Realizing the type of phonemic theory which underlies this case history, the quotation above is all the more striking. In fact, it does not fit the tone of the rest of the paper at all. We can only conclude that something about Stephen's behavior must have been extremely striking in order to motivate the father's observation. Could it be that Stephen was quite pleased with himself for what he recognized as a significant breakthrough? Up to this time , Stephen had only a syllable inventory; but at I; 5, Stephen had begun to acquire the incipient distinctive feature oppositions t/k and a/i . Complete data might indicate others. Near the end of the month, Burling tells us , his son "acquired" the phoneme /1/. He used it for the name of his Garo nurse, Emula, which he produced as !ala. We might wonder why Stephen did not pronounce this name as mula since he already had "acquired "the phonemes /m/, /u/, and /a/. The answer is that he was not acquiring /1/, but rather the syllable Ia . At this very early stage of verbal behavior, this radically new syllable had to be utilized in the earlier practice frame of the reduplicated CVCV word, a frame whose function is in part to provide ideal conditions for the stabilization of the phonetic realization of the new syllable by time-wise juxtaposing two occurrences for the sake of comparison. To have chosen instead the pronunciation 1ul a would have been to choose a structure at the very limits of his phonological capacity , one which involves the additional information of an incipient contrast, introducing a conflict with the need for phenetic practice . Thus again it appears that the child is "sensible" enough to attack only one "linguistic front" at a time with each new word. The pronunciation mula is obviously far beyond the child's capabilities at this point. The word !ala for Stephen is a by-product of an extremely adaptive mechanism which balances the phonological and phonetic complexities in such an intricate way that a new lexical item makes only a limited contribution to the advancement of the sound system and also makes only limited demands on the expanding productive capacity. The child cannot utilize just one lexical item as a source of considerable achievement both phonologically and phonetically. (5) Previous investigators of child language have referred to a distinction between production and perception to explain what appears to be a discrepancy between what the child utters at a given time and what he can accurately respond to . Perception has been seen as always in advance of production. This discrepancy, while important, is not the basic dichotomy which needs to be explained . It is rather the discrepancy between the systematic (in this case, phonological) and non-systematic (in this case , phonetic) aspects of speech. A child is able to hear and respond . to many utterances on the basis of their phonetic content, but with few exceptions she limits her productions to that which she has been able to systematize. Thus her productions are based on derived knowledge about the phonology with respect to the particular phonological unit which the child is employing at a particular stage . The phonetic nature of her productions is limited to the possible phonetic realizations of her phonological units, although there is no such limitation of her perception . (See

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Moskowitz 1975, and 1971, for additional discussion of the dichotomies between phonetics and phonology and between production and perception.) The acquisition of phonology -the search for the syste'matic nature of speech - revolves around the discovery of these successively more abstract phonological units in the mental representation of language. The productions of a child at any point in time form a relatively coherent whole phonologically. In contrast, the speech of a child often exhibits extreme phonetic fluctuation as the child attempts to defme for herself the limits of the phonetic manifestation of any given phonological unit. Many superficially odd phenomena can be explained as a product of this conflict. Consider, for example, Steve, who at age 2 sometimes produced lfJI as [fJ), but more often as [t] or [s] ; at age 3 he always produced lfJ I as [f) , and continued to do so for several more years before correctly producing [fJ) again. Clearly he had the phonetic ability to produce [fJ] correctly at age 2, although for some non-phonological reason he was not able to produce it consistently. Thus it would be reasonable to ascribe to him knowledge of [fJ] as a phonological entity despite the phonetic variation in its pronunciation. Although his acquisition of the correct phonetic exponent of lfJ I was not complete until considerably later , there is no reason to believe that his knowledge of it as a phonological entity did deminish during that period. Or consider Erica, who at 2; 3 produced lrl correctly, but Ill as either [I} or [y] ; at 2; 6 this same child abandoned these attempts and resigned herself to substituting [r] for Ill . Lack of phonetic ability is certainly not the sole cause of these situatitions, since both children produced some phonetically correct instances at an earlier time. Or consider Mackie (Moskowitz, 1970) for whom a substitution analysis indicates that he produced a correct [th] or [t=] or [ .c] for It I 90% of the time initially, 7 5% medially, and 40% finally. (the diacritic [=] is here used to specify "unaspirated".) What causes the incorrect phonetic substitutions in the other instances? Articulatory inability does not appear to be the answer. In fact, although only a single output occurs, and only that one set of data is available to us as observers, it is clearly the product of numerous simultaneous constraints. Steven and Erica encountered difficulties with the phonetic properties of [fJ) and [I], and eventually abandoned all attempts to solve those problems by adopting expedient, although 'incorrect', phonetic manifestations for what they recognized to be a phonological unit. These expedient solutions allowed the two learners to turn their linguistic attention to other areas of language where the level of problems available might be more amenable to resolution. At a later time, Steven and Erica could, and indeed did, return to the phonetic realization of [fJ) and [I] and improve them sufficiently to achieve the same level of phonetic proficiency as characterizes the speech of all other normal speakers of English. Steven and Erica are not at all unusual, and the pattern of abandoning and later resuming the pronunciation problems of sounds like [fJ}, [I}, [r}, and others is common among learners. Mackie's pattern of partially correct phonetic substitutions is also common . Both of these situations arise from phonetic problems. In none of these situations is there reason to assume that there are concurrent difficulties in the phonological representations of these sounds. Still other evidence indicates that the dichotomy between phonetics and phonology is an important problem with ramifications for the child's learning process and that the child has more phonetic knowledge than is in evidence m her usual productions. Reilly (1977) has compiled many examples of children taking a "second turn" to repeat an utterance with some improvement. She has argued that in these cases the child needed the second turn to produce the improved utterance because that improved utterance was beyond the child's systematic language ability at that time and would have been impossible on the first turn. The child often takes advantage of the recency of the first turn to extend the frontier of her productive abilities and advance the complexity of the utterance. Reilly has documented the use of this strategy in examples illustrating improvements in pronunciation, morphology, syntax , and semantics, by children across ages from 18 months to 7 years, learning English, .

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Finnish , French , and Thai. Forms used in second or successive turns seem to anticipate forms which will be available for first turns (i.e., which will be incorporated into the productive grammar) within a short time. Reilly's pronunciation examples illustrate phonetic ability exceeding that reflected in phonologically regular utterances, as in the following dialogue about a teapot between Teddy (18 months) and his mother : [bib:>] Teddy: Mother:

What?

Teddy:

[btp:> 1

Mother :

What?

Teddy : [tip:>] The most striking examples of the conflicting phonetic and phonological capacities of the child occur in the realm of idiomatic utterances. (6) Idioms are deviations : they are not produced in the same way that regular utterances are. Either they differ in their form of lexical storage (mental representation) or they are exceptions to the rules of the phonological component being constructed in the mind of the learner, or both . The progressive idioms of children, which do not obey the phonetic restrictions of other lexical items, appear not to be encoded in the same phonological manner; they are not sequences of instances of that phonological unit which organizes the grammar at that stage. For example , Paul's "orange juice" bore no relation to the simple CV syllables of his syllable-unit phonology . Immediate idioms , and even perseverant ones eventually , are re-encoded into a phonologically regular form, such as Paul's (du] , which was apparently a new syllable. Hildegard 's (prati], introduced at 0; 8 , far exceeded the phonetic complexity of her other lexical items. It persevered to 1; 8, at which time she already had several partial reduplications in her repetoire . Her first CVCV word with no reduplication was [ptti], which replaced (prati], and almost immediately afterward several other non-reduplicated CVCV forms were produced for other items . It appears that her idiom was replaced with a regular form only when her phonology had advanced sufficiently . What about regressive idioms? The only idioms which are easily identifiable as progressive are those which are extremely obvious due to their phonetic unusualness. There may well be others , which are less obvious because they are not so deviant , or because the child does not choose to use them . These Covert idioms, when they are perseverant, eventually do appear to be deviant phonetically - because they are too simple - at the later time when they can be identified as regressive. Whether an idiom appears to be phonetically more complex (progressive) or less so (regressive) is in some sense inconsequential : what is common to these various forms is that they are encoded in a phonological unit which is more primitive than the one which forms the basis of the regular items . For the examples given earlier , systematic analyses have shown that children employed the syllable as the basic phonological unit. Their idiomatic fom1s, "orange juice" and "pretty", were not separated into component syllables - and the individual syllables anyway are far more complex than the CVs of their other utterances; each was a single unit , not further analyzed phonologically , and with complex phonetic content. In the case of the perseverant items like Hildegard's "pretty" , the form in effect .;onstitutes a single phonological unit for the child. This situation contrasts with that of the immediate idiom, which may not have any phonological encoding at all or which may be a manifestation of the more primitive sentence-unit. The well-known phenomenon of rapid spread throughout the lexicon of a newly acquired phonological distinction , and the evidence of idioms, suggest that the child normally has at least two separate lexical encodings for any item : a phonological encoding, based on her analysis of the language , and a phonetic one , including all of the unanalyzed and redundant

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information of the model utterance. There does not seem to be any way to account for the child 's speech behavior without postulating dual lexical representations. This duality probably disappears by the end of the acquisition process. It may be that detailed phonetic storage is abandoned or forgotten when the child completes her analysis of the phonological system. Or it may be that the two forms of storage gradually coalesce as the child separates redundant from distinctive information. Progressive idioms appear to be initially based on the phonetic form of lexical storage . In the case of the long-term idioms, when a phonological encoding is established, it involves a unit which is less sophisticated than the one being employed in regular speech . Idioms are also exceptions to the rules of the phonological component - not to one or more rules but to the entire set. At least in the speech of children this is true by definition , since the phonological rules must be designed for use with a particular phonological unit. It may well be that one item may be progressively idiomatic at one stage , then covert , and finally regressive. Throughout all these stages the item must be encoded differently from regul ar lexical items. And as a result of this different encoding, it does not fall into the domain of whatever phonological changes are sweeping through the lexicon. This exceptional status of idioms - exceptional to the synchronic rules of the grammar and to the diachronic changes which affect other items - appears to be true also of adult idioms , including ideophones. Crawford ( 1970) reported that sounds which had occurred at an earlier stage in Cocopa , but which were eliminated by a historical change in the language , still occur only in the very limited vocabulary of baby-talk items . Press (pers. comm .) also found relic items, preserving sounds otherwise eliminated from the language's inventory , among the baby-talk of Chemehuevi , a geographically close but unrealated language. Such preservations, exemptions from diachronic change , suggest parallels to regressive idioms and to ideophones, not just in their phonological abnormalit y but also in the highly- marked and emotional nature of that subsection of the lexicon. Experimental work with dichotic listening has tended to substantiate the belief (see e.g. Van l..ancker 1975) that a class of lexical items and phrases termed "automatic speech"is neurophysiologically encoded differently from regular speech. In particular, automatic speech appears to be bilaterally encoded rather than located in the left hemisphere. It is also relatively well -known that it is only after several years of age that speech in fact becomes left lateralized, and young children seem to have relatively equal availability of either hemisphere. Pap~un, Krashen, Terbeek, Remington, and Harshman (1974) suggested that it is not language per se which is laterialized, but rather that timing and ordering functions are located in the left hemisphere while pitch discrimination is right lateralized, and many others support this view. More work is needed to estab lish these facts incontrovertibly. However, the current evidence is sufficient to lend plausibility to the following interpretation of the neurophysiological basis of idiomatic phonology. Absolute phonetic perception involves judgments of both pitch and timing/ordering/duration phenomena, and involves both hemispheres. Until the child has reached the last stages of acquisition - at which time judgments of the identity of abstract units take precedence over phonetic ones - she must depend on both hemispheres. Regular speech is more fully phonological than the child's idiolectal idioms, and thus has the potential for more specialized encoding . As the speaker grows older this neurological discrepancy increases. Jespersen ( 1964) suggested that automatic speech is often exempt from the domain of diachronic change. Idioms are exempt also. It is reasonable to assume that idioms and automatic speech have in common a neurophysiological basis distinct from that of regular speech; in particular , one involving chunks of (systematically) unanalyzed speech larger than the phonological segment. The domain of such units may be. the syllable, the word, or even the phrase. The commonality of the forms can potentially be checked by applying dichotic

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listening procedures to idiomatic items in addition to automatic speech. I hope that such tests will be carried out in the near future. ( 6.1) One way of looking at the diachronic aspect of phonology acquisition is to consider the kinds of phonological changes which take place . Diachronia of child acquisition can be subclassified into two categories: (a) those which are predicted by a theory of the mental and linguistic processes of acquisition, and which therefore may or may not be evidenced by immediate and obvious pronunciation changes; and (b) those which are observed to occur over and over again across children and even across languages, and which must be accounted for by any theory. Without attempting to be exhaustive, we can consider several different kinds of change: (ai) The change from one level of unit to another as the basis of phonological organization. This is the most pervasive and significant change which can occur, resulting in the ultimate restructuring of the lexicon and the phonological rules connecting the mental lexical encoding with actual pronunciation. Involved in this process of change is the systematization of a previously paradigmatic contrast to a synchronic one. Particular milestones in the changing structure of the phonological word [discussed in (4)] indirectly confirm this occurrence. (aii) The transfer of known phonological information from incorporation in one kind of unit to another, and the concomitant transfer of phonetic information. There are no overt changes in phonetic pronunciation which indicate this change, but it is usually signalled by a sudden increase in the percentage of lexical items conforming to less restrictive morpheme structure constraints. (aiii) The addition of a new (phonetically distinct) manifestation of a phonological unit of the same type which is already in use, introducing a new phonological contrast, and often a new phonetic one as well. (aiv) The complete revision of the set of phonological rules at the time of (aii), and the modification of the set of rules at the time of (aiii). (bi) The development of a new phonetic realization for an existing phonological unit. Such a change often occurs dramatically, as when the correct phonetics are suddenly sorted out for two "phonemes" which previously sounded phonetically identical to the ears of adult speakers, although the child may have been producing a consistent but inappropriate distinction which the adults were unable to hear ; or when the child suddenly incorporates a new sound in her speech, and does so appropriately throughout the lexicon, although the sound had previously been omitted everywhere. The former situation has been noted many times, and is usually referred to as the "fis" phenomenon , following Brown's (19) report of the prototypical example, in which the child produced "fis" for "fish" but refused to accept the pronunciation "fis" from a~J adult speaker. (No published reports of this phenomenon have clarified, to my knowledge, whether the child did produce any phonetic distinction.) The latter phenomenon -sudden spread of a "phoneme"- is often noticed to occur with /r/ . (bii) The opposed phonetic situation, the slow and nondramatic spread of a single phonetic realization. With the exception of the ali-or-nothing situation described above, which is usually confined to "difficult" sounds and probably results from suppression (see Moskowitz 1975), individual segments exhibit long periods of development from their first systematic occurrence (e ;g. the first utterance of /pa/) to the time when they are produced correctly all of the time in all positions where the adult model includes them (e.g. all relevant allophones of /p/ in all positions). Development and substitution patterns are often different for distinct positionally- or environmentally-conditioned allophones, and individual lexical items often exhibit considerable fluctuation in the space of a few minutes. Much of this variation involves quite gross phonetic differences. (biii) Loss of potential contrastive function of two phones -by suppression (Moskowitz 1975), by allophonic organization , etc.

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(6.2) The diachronic processes of1anguage and those of acquisition have tempted linguists for years into speculation about the interrelationship. Fruitless attempts have been made to link phonological changes with the errors of developing children (see, e.g. Saussure; 1959, Bloomfield, 1933; Hockett, 1968). The f~lacies of the arguments need not be emphasized; the arguments have undoubtedly existed for want of more plausible relating factors. There is one possible, and to my knowledge previously unrecognized, source of truth in these arguments, however: it is now well attested that morphological and syntactic environments can condition and/or affect phonological changes. The kinds of morphological, syntactic, and phonological distortions which occur in acquisition are largely regular, not only in the speech of an individual child but also across children and across languages (see, e.g. Slobin 1973). The kinds of phonological changes which occur in languages are increasingly being recognized as phonetically motivated (in the sense of phonetic motivation used by I.adefoged 1972). J akobson (1968) has suggested that child and adult diachronia obey the same constraints. It is at least possible that a change which is "inherent" in a language is carried farther by a new generation (or is phonetically realized by a new generation initially) precisely because the systematic distortions which are necessary to acquisition provide the appropriate environment for such a change to be brought to systematic, phonological fruition. The traditional view of sound change has centered on claims of phonetic graduality and phonological abruptness , both for speaker and for language. The biuniqueness conditions of synchronic analyses required that a gradual phonetic change, having reached a certain point in its course, became a phonological one due to its interaction with the remainder of the system; prior to that point the change was unconscious. The work of l.abov (e.g. 1963) has amply demonstrated the untenability of this claim of unconsciousness prior to phonological actualization of a change . In addition, l.abov, Yaeger & Steines (1973) strongly suggest that very minor but consistent phonetic distinctions may persist for even hundreds of years after two sounds have "merged": thus phonetic merger is not an absolutely necessary precondition for, or integral step in, phonological change. This situation is quite plausible when it is considered that children learn to control minor phonetic differences in the context of the syllable long before segmental units are involved in their phonological structure. Wang (1969) has demonstrated that in many cases phonological change cannot possibly be considered to involve articulatory graduality. Labov eta/. (1973) and Andersen (1973) have claimed that in some of these cases acoustic graduality may be involved. In light of all of thiswork, the view of sound change as a phonetically gradual process which becomes phonemic at some point is unacceptable . Some sound changes may evolve on a dimension which allows gradual acoustic shift, but it has not been shown that it involves anything more than phonetic plausibility of motivation. In at least some .. cases, phonetic abruptness must be accepted. Comparing the (b) type changes in acquisition listed above, we see that phonetic abruptness, rather than graduality, is the norm in childhood diachronia also. In addition , Wang suggests that a sound change diffuses gradually from one speaker to another. Gradual diffusion also characterizes changes (ai) and (aii) in acquisition. In conclusion, Wang's hypothesis oflexical diffusion incorporates assumptions about change which are optimally adequate for the changes in acquisition also . (6.3) Wang states that as a change diffuses through the lexicon, some items are exceptions until such time as the change reaches completion. An uncomplete change is therefore the source of a split without any obvious conditioning factors. Even more interesting, exceptional items or permanently incomplete changes result from competing changes which intersect in numerous ways. Noticing that the kinds of changes discussed above for children operate on several different levels, the interaction and competition of these changes can be used to explain many phenomena of acquisition (e.g. see Moskowitz, 1975) which make little sense when viewed on only one level, just as Wang has pointed out that the single-level

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neogrammarian view of sound change had to virtually wish out of existence all the residue , marginalia, and reallife exceptions which typically constitute a larger part of the data but which almost never have been reported in linguistic study. As Wang points out, their profusion is accessible to any student of the dictionary. The question remains, in the areas both of idomatic phonology and phonological change, why does a change affect some items before others, and how do those items get selected? It is perhaps easier to begin to answer this question at the other end of the process. Those items which are permanent residue of a change (not due to competition resulting in incomplete change) may be , like regressive idioms and automatic speech, based on different neurological encoding. (To whatever extent differential lateralization is involved, this claim is feasibly testable.) But where competition is involved , or where a change simply has not completed itself nor reversed , some sort of hierarchy of the lexicon is probably involved. Frequency obviously plays a role here. In the area of morphology, exceptions are almost always to be found among items of extremely high or extremely low frequency. In phonology, automatic speech items are also of high frequency. Idioms of children, both perseverant progressive and regressive ones, are usually of quite high frequency as individual items for the particular child. Whether the low frequency situation is as applicable to phonology as to morphology is not an answerable question at this time. Undoubtedly, other non-linguistic factors are of importance. Hildegard's word "pretty" was not only phonologically deviant and of frequent use, but was subjectively reported as being used with "delight" (Leopold 1939). The emotional content of regressive items like "daddy" and " pacifier" also must be high. A means o f quantifying individual psychological responses to lexical items may be prerequisite to further discoveries about the mechanisms of lexical diffusion .

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I'erguson, C. (1964) . Baby talk in six languages. In Ethnpgraphy of Communication (J. Gumpcrz & D. Hymes, eds.), supplement to American Anthropology 66, \03 - 114. Grekoff, G. (n.d.) untitled ms. o n o ne child's early speech. Hockett , C. (I 958). A course in Modem Linguistics. New York: The Macmillan Compa ny . Jakobson , R. (1968) . Child Language, Aphasia, and Phonological Universals. Mouton: The Hag ue. (trans. by A . R. Keiler; orig. pub\. I 941) . Jakobson, R. & Halle M. (1956) . Fundamentals of Speech. Mouton: The Hague. Jespersen, 0. (1964). Language. New York : W. W. Norton . Labov, William . (I 963). The social motivations of a sound change . Word 19, 27 3- 309. Labov, W. Yaeger, Steiner. ( 197 3). Quantitative Study of Sound Change in Progress. 2 vols . Ladefoged , P. (1972) . Preliminaries to linguistic phonetics. University o f Chicago Press: Chicago Leopold, W. F. (1939 - I 949). Speech DePelop men t of a Bilingual Child. Northwestern University Press: Evanston. Lindner, G. (I 898). A us dem Naturgarten der Kindersprache. Leipzig. Moskowitz, A. I. (1970). The two-year-old stage in the acquisition of English phonology. Lan{
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55 , 319 - 327. Reilly, J . ( 1977) . Th e seco nd time aro und : ex pansio ns and refin ement s in children 's seco nd turns . Unpub lished masters th esis , UC LA , Dept. o f Ling uisti cs . de Saussure, 1-'. (1 95 9). Course in General Linguistics. New Yo rk: McG raw-Hill Boo k Co. ( trans. by Wade Baskin). Slo b in , D. I. (1973) . Cognitive prerequi sites to the develop ment of grammar. In Studies of Child Language Development. New Yo rk : (Siob in , D. L & Ferguso n , C. A.). Ho lt , Rinehart, and Winston . Van Lan cker, D. (1 975) . Heterogeneity in la ng uage and speech: neurolinguistic studies. UCLA Working

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Wang, W. (196 9). Co mpeting changes as a cause of residue . Language. 45,9 - 25 . Welme rs, W. ( 1972). African language structures. Berk eley , Los Angeles. Unive rsit y of CaJifornia Press.