Two processes in Danish dysphonology: Fronting and glottal closing

Abstract

The study examines the absence of certain consonants in the language of three Danish children of different age with phonological impairment. The consonant inventories are very similar and lack aspirated stops, unvoiced fricatives and velars and postvelars. These sound classes are substituted by other sounds or deleted in accordance with regular patterns. The clusters are also affected, but the remaining language subsystems appear to be age-appropriate. The lack of velars and phones further back in children with language impairment has been documented in other studies. However, the absence of these sound classes in combination with the lack of aspirated stops and unvoiced fricatives in Danish children has not been described before. Furthermore, the correlation between the missing aspirated stops and unvoiced fricatives independently corroborates the kinship between these sounds in Danish. It is discussed whether the subjects' lack of distinction between the features “+/− back and between the Danish feature...