A Phonological Analysis of the Spontaneous Language of a Four-Year-Old, Hard-of-Hearing Child

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Abstract
This paper presents a linguistic analysis of the phonological system of a four-year-old, hard-of-hearing girl. The purpose is to clarify what phonological structures the child used and thereby to demonstrate the efficacy of a linguistic analysis. The phonetic structure of nonintelligible utterances was analyzed separately from the phonemic analysis of the intelligible, or so-called comparative, data. For the latter, specific phonemes were termed “fairly well established” when the child used a number of appropriate allophones, although these same allophones may have appeared in other classes, and “not established” when allophones were not appropriately used. This categorized the state of the child’s phonemic development. For example, in manner of articulation only the stop/resonant contrast was present; in place of articulation, only the gross labial/nonlabial distinction was consistent. An important discovery from the noncomparative data was that [w] and [?] were used as coarse phonetic representatives of possible syllabic or syntactic configurations. Therapy is suggested for more firmly establishing stop/resonant contrasts, teaching the concept of frication, and encouraging further development of primitive linguistic stages.

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