Monday, December 24, 2007

You say potato I say dadada

Ah the joys of family and little kids -- and obvious input/output phonological data provided by a 19 month old niece. Some basic early phonological processes.

wipes → peeps: /wəɪps/ → [pips]
chip → pip/peep: /ʧɪp/ → [pʰIp]/[pʰip]
grape → peep: /gɹeɪp/ → [pip]
Blake → Pete: /bleɪk/ → [pit]
cookie → teetee: /kʊki/ → [titi]
TV → beebee: /tivi/ → [bibi]
crayons → crots: /kɹeanz/ → [kɹats]
santa → tahta: /sæntə/ → [tʰãta]
michael → cocku: /məɪkl̩ /→ [kʰaku]
buffy → fuffy: /bʌfi/ → [ɸʌfi]/[fʌfi]
sock → cock:/sak/ → [kak]
Mark → cock: /maɹk/ → [kak]

(And she would probably not say [dadada] for 'potato'. Maybe [tito] because she's stuck on 1 and 2 syllable words. And 'tomato' comes out [mimo].)

Of course these pronunciations are changing. She's getting closer and closer to some of the expected phones in her pronunciation. And there's of course a lot of room for variation since her articulation isn't precise.

The aspiration on some of the voiceless stops isn't always clear but I transcribe it where I see it most regularly. I like that altho the /t/ stop of the affricate in 'chip' becomes [p] the release in the affricate is performed as an aspirated release.

There's clear favouring of reduplication in the output and it's almost always regressive. There are a few words that don't pattern like the rest. I would expect her to say [kik] as the output for "Blake" but she introduces two sounds that aren't in the input. Perhaps everyone around here produces a glottal stop in [bleIʔ] and she has learned it as an allophone of /t/.

She says "Santa" with a nasalized [a] but no alveolar nasal as the coda. She is able to articulate the nasal in a coda -- as in corn which she pronounces [kɔn] -- but it might be tougher before a C (given how much more natural the CVCV syllable structure is in early language development).

There are some vowels that show something about the way these adults around here speak. Nobody says kɹænz here altho that's a common pronunciation of crayons. The [a] gets drawn out and thats the sound that she holds onto.

And of course everyone's favourite is when she points at Mark and starts calling him names. He's a nice guy but she apparently thinks he's a bit of a jerk.

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