The nondeviant nature of deviant phonological systems

Abstract

Few studies of children with defective speech or deviant phonologies have gone beyond the level of phonetic representation in limited environments. The Lorentz (1976) study of Joe, a 4.5-yr-old child with a phonological disorder, is exceptional inasmuch as underlying phonemic representations and phonological rules are posited in addition to the surface phonetic representations. However, his analysis crucially depends on morphosyntactic information that cannot be independently justified. A reanalysis of Joe's data within Kahn's (1976) syllable-based model of generative phonology reveals that the child's phonological rules are syllabically conditioned exclusively. In particular, the application of certain rules is found to depend on whether or not an internal syllable boundary is present within a polysyllabic word. In the course of the reanalysis, issues concerning naturalness of individual phonological rules, ordering relations between pairs of rules, feature systems, the phonological representation of double-articulated consonants, and the role of the syllable as an element in phonological descriptions are discussed. Paradoxically, Joe's phonological system is found to be “normal,” as measured in terms of the above-mentioned linguistic parameters, yet his speech output is “abnormal,” as measured against the adult norm.