Misarticulations of Two Jordanian Children

Abstract

This paper examines the speech of two functionally misarticulating Jordanian children and illustrates the variability of misarticulation patterns as well as the failure of markedness to account for them. The presentation is very similar to work by Gierut describing misarticulating English-learning children (Gierut 1984, 1985), but in this case the children are learning Arabic. The term ‘functional misarticulation’ is typically used to describe the speech of speakers whose chronic articulatory errors cannot be attributed to any obvious organic disorder such as hearing impairment or cleft palate (Ingram 1976, Compton 1970). The basic assumption of much of the work done on speech misarticulations is that children's knowledge is identical to that of the ambient speech community (Compton 1975, Lorentz 1976). Within this framework, misarticulators are viewed as a homogenous group. Any discrepancy between the misarticulators' system and the ambient system is described as a ‘process’ (Shriberg & Kwiatkowski 1982). However, the many diverse phonological rules that have been posited to derive the misarticulators' surface structure from underlying structure make it difficult to arrive at any but gross commonalities across functional misarticulation systems (Ingram 1976). Such an assumption is a clear misrepresentation of the apparent differences across the misarticulation systems (Dinnsen, Elbert & Weismer 1980).