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Ultrasound Images of the Tongue: A Tutorial for Assessment and Remediation of Speech Sound Errors
Published on: January 3, 2017
Positional velar fronting: an updated articulatory account
1Montclair State University, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Bloomsfield, NJ 07003, USA. mcalistert@mail.montclair.edu
Journal of Child Language
|January 10, 2012
Summary
Children
Area of Science:
- Child language acquisition
- Phonetics and phonology
Background:
- Children often exhibit positional velar fronting, a speech pattern where 'k' and 'g' sounds are produced further forward in the mouth.
- This phenomenon is linked to immature articulatory abilities in young speakers.
Purpose of the Study:
- To propose a phonological model explaining positional velar fronting in children.
- To investigate the role of articulatory limitations in children's speech sound development.
Main Methods:
- Development of a phonetically sensitive phonological model.
- Analysis of a longitudinal case study of a child's speech development (ages 3;9 to 4;4).
- Application of the Harmonic Grammar framework with a proposed constraint: Move-as-Unit.
Main Results:
- Children's difficulty with discrete tongue movements, preferring unified tongue-jaw motion, contributes to velar fronting.
- The constraint Move-as-Unit explains why fronting is positionally sensitive, being more pronounced in complex motor contexts.
- Segmental and prosodic factors influencing fronting can be unified within this grammatical system.
Conclusions:
- Positional velar fronting in children can be understood as a phonologically encoded articulatory limitation.
- The Move-as-Unit constraint provides a unified explanation for various conditioning factors in child speech errors.
- This model advances the understanding of child phonology and articulatory constraints.
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