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Positional velar fronting: An updated articulatory account*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 January 2012

TARA MCALLISTER BYUN
TARA MCALLISTER BYUN*
Affiliation:
Montclair State University
*
Address for correspondence: Tara McAllister Byun, Montclair State University, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, 1515 Broad Street, Building B, 2nd Floor, Bloomfield, NJ 07003. tel: 973-655-3919; fax: 973-655-3406; e-mail: mcallistert@mail.montclair.edu
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Abstract

This study develops the hypothesis that the child-specific phenomenon of positional velar fronting can be modeled as the product of phonologically encoded articulatory limitations unique to immature speakers. Children have difficulty executing discrete tongue movements, preferring to move the tongue and jaw as a single unit. This predisposes the child to produce undifferentiated linguopalatal contact, neutralizing the coronal–velar contrast. Adopting a phonetically sensitive model of phonology, I propose that children's difficulty with discrete tongue movement can be encoded in a violable constraint, Move.as-Unit. The positional nature of fronting reflects the fact that discrete lingual movement is penalized more heavily in the motorically challenging context of a larger gesture. This analysis is supported with a longitudinal study of one child (3 ; 9 to 4 ; 4) whose fronting was conditioned by both segmental and prosodic factors. Adopting Move.as-Unit in a Harmonic Grammar framework makes it possible to reframe disparate-seeming conditioning factors as a unified grammatical system.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 39 , Issue 5 , November 2012 , pp. 1043 - 1076
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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Footnotes

[*]

The author would like to acknowledge Adam Albright for his invaluable contributions to this project. This work has benefited from commentary from Donca Steriade, Edward Flemming, Yvan Rose, Katherine Demuth, Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel and Adam Buchwald. Thanks also go to Haiyan Su for statistical consultation, to Magdi Sobeih for supporting this research, and to ‘Ben’ and his family for their unflagging cooperation.

References

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