Phonological organization in early speech production: Evidence for the importance of articulatory patterns

Abstract

The present study investigates on the basis of which units and strategies children initially organize their speech. Transcribed longitudinal data from children acquiring German as their L1 are presented. The data were obtained in weekly recording sessions, which began when the subjects were between seven and thirteen months old. All the material was collected within the framework of the Kiel Project on Early Phonological Development. The evidence presented in this paper suggests that a limited inventory of articulatory patterns functioning as underlying organizational units may determine the phonetic structure of the large majority of a child's first words. The patterns are most probably constructed on the basis of a child's preferred articulations as well as on the basis of the acoustically and auditorily most salient features of adult model words. The articulatory patterns a child relies on may involve different types of syllable structure and they usually allow for a certain amount of phonetic variation in the child's forms for a specific word. There are basically five ways in which the early or original patterns change over time.