Jonah Bossewitch	LIN 213/ENG 213

October 27, 1995	Professor Maggie Browning

MIDTERM - Part II

Neil Smith's 'puzzle' puzzle is a prime example of why linguists should never have children. Instead of just spending time with his two and a half year old son Amahl, Smith could not help but perform language experiments on the unsuspecting toddler. Smith had noticed that his Amahl had problems pronouncing certain words (it doesn't take a linguist to notice this effect). Smith decided to try and determine if there was a systematic pattern to these "alternative" pronunciations and if so, what was its cause.

Smith first set out to determine if the alternative pronunciation effect was rule governed or completely random. He collected and analyzed data of his sons's utterances and found that there seemed to be phonological rules of the form A->B/context. He tested his hypotheses by making predictions about how Amahl would pronounce a word that he did not know and then teaching that word to him (did his wife know what he was doing?).

Still it was unclear what type of underlying representation Amahl had for words. Was his pronunciation the result of poor perceptual skills, inadequate production skills, and/or some set of derivational productions? Smith believes that he has eliminated the possibility of perceptual deficiencies based on selected observations of Amahl's behavior. He tested Amahl's ability to differentiate minimal pairs by having him retrieve the picture corresponding to the word Smith asked for (did he ever do one for 'fetch'?). He also cites children reacting negatively to adult mispronunciations, and Amahl's apparent conscious awareness of his pronounciational limitations as further evidence of children's impeccable perceptual skills. Smith's final model of children's phonological representation looks like this: [Adult Pronunciation = Child's Mental Representation] -> derivational rules -> [Child's Pronunciation].

Marcie Macken analyzed the exact same data that Smith used and argued that children's perception was not perfect. She did this by showing that in certain cases Amahl's pronunciation was different from the adult version, and yet there was no rule that could account for this derivation. Smith felt that based on this argument he had to revise his model of children's phonological representations so it now looked like this:[Adult Pronunciation] -> perceptual filter ->[Child's Mental Representation] -> derivational rules -> [Child's Pronunciation].

There is no reason to doubt Smith's initial finding that Children's pronunciation is rule based. Adult pronunciation is based on an underlying representation that is transformed by rules and it is absurd to think that children do it any other way. An idea that Smith did not explore is the possibility that phonological development follows a developmental path analogous to syntactic development. Perhaps there is some kind of universal phonology that needs to have its parameters set before it is fully functional. Once a child gets past the formidable task of differentiating speech sounds from all other sounds, how is the child supposed to know which features are relevant in sound production? Perhaps some of the pronunciation difficulties in children is due to the fact that children are not contrasting certain features and end up treating some phenomes as free allophones. This might better explain the occurrence that Smith describes as 'across-the-board' learning. Otherwise, his analysis seemed consistent and plausible given what we have learned about phonology. Of course, the most important lesson of this article is when hiring a babysitter, always make sure that they're not interested in certain word related disciplines.

I plej mI anor thet I hev nat vIOlAted thi anor kOd during thes egzam.