Tara McAllister

1
Patterns of Gestural Overlap Account for
Positional Fricative Neutralization in Child
Phonology

• Tara McAllister
• Montclair State University, Montclair, New
  Jersey
• mcallistert_at_mail.montclair.edu

2
Outline

• An interesting data set from phonological
  acquisition (positional fricative gliding).
• Why these child data are difficult to square with
  what we know about adult phonological typology.
• Claim A phonetically-based approach to phonology
  makes it possible to give a principled account of
  child-specific phenomena.
• Fricative substitution errors are analyzed as a
  phonologized response to a child-specific
  articulatory limitation on overlapping vowel and
  fricative gestures.
• Positional asymmetry emerges as the consequence
  of differing degrees of gestural overlap
  permitted in syllable-initial versus
  syllable-final position (Articulatory Phonology).

3
Case study data

• Data were collected from a single case study
  subject between the ages of 39 and 43.
• Ben is a monolingual English learner with
  severe phonological delay/disorder.
• Active phonological patterns in addition to the
  pattern of interest
• cluster reduction
• velar fronting
• liquid gliding
• final devoicing
• debuccalization of coda stops

4
Positional neutralization of fricatives (PFN)

• Bens positional fricative neutralization pattern
  (39-310)
• Syllable-initial fricatives are realized as
  glides.
• ji see ja? shark
• joi sewing jip sheep
• jiba zebra wu? food
• woda? forgot  

5
Positional neutralization of fricatives (PFN)

• Bens positional fricative neutralization pattern
  (39-310)
• Syllable-initial fricatives are realized as
  glides.
• ji see ja? shark
• joi sewing jip sheep
• jiba zebra wu? food
• woda? forgot  
• Syllable-final fricatives preserve faithful
  manner (not necessarily place or voicing).
• mas mouse j?? fish
• bis beans b??ba? Spongebob
• babajis strawberries was five

6
Why is PFN of interest?

• Not unique to Ben.
• Numerous studies have documented children
  acquiring fricatives in syllable-final before
  syllable-initial contexts.
• In babbling (Gildersleeve-Neumann et al. 2000
  Oller Eilers, 1982 Redford et al. 1997)
• In meaningful speech (Dinnsen, 1996 Edwards,
  1996 Farwell, 1976 Ferguson, 1978 Stites,
  Demuth, Kirk, 2004 Stoel-Gammon, 1985)
• Pattern is not universal, but general consensus
  is that fricatives in final position have a
  favored status in acquisition (Edwards, 1979).

7
Why is PFN of interest?

• PFN is a child-specific pattern that reverses a
  strong bias in adult phonological typology.
• In fully-developed phonologies, the maximum range
  of featural contrasts is realized in
  initial/prevocalic position.
• Example Manner contrasts in Korean (Ahn, 1998)
• Stop, fricative, affricate manner allowed in
  onset position.
• All manner contrasts neutralized to stop in coda
  position.
• PFN belongs to set of child processes of
  neutralization in strong position (Dinnsen
  Farris-Trimble, 2008 Inkelas Rose, 2003, 2008
  McAllister, 2009)
• Challenge notion of continuity of child and adult
  grammars.

8
Neutralization in strong position

• Lets try to model PFN with a general constraint
  Fricatives
• In a positional faithfulness framework (Beckman,
  1997), we need a constraint enhancing
  faithfulness to weak/final position.
• Ident-manner-weak gtgt Fricatives gtgt Ident-manner
• In a positional markedness framework (Smith,
  2000, 2002), we need a constraint limiting
  featural contrasts in strong position.
• Fricatives gtgt Ident-manner gtgt Fricatives
• If Ident-manner-weak or Fricatives are possible
  constraints, we should find examples of adult
  phonologies with featural neutralization in
  strong position.
• Such grammars are in fact unattested.

9
Phonetics in child phonology

• The challenge Model childrens positional
  neutralization without making incorrect
  predictions for the possible range of variation
  in adult grammars.
• My claim The most principled accounts of
  child-specific phonological patterns have adopted
  a phonetically-based approach to phonology
  (Dinnsen Farris-Trimble, 2008 Inkelas Rose,
  2003, 2007 McAllister, 2009 Pater, 1997).
• It is uncontroversial that children and adults
  experience the physical act of producing/perceivin
  g speech in different ways.
• Different articulatory anatomy and speech-motor
  control
• Different perceptual sensitivities

10
Phonetically-based phonology

• Since children and adults are subject to
  different low-level phonetic pressures, the
  phonetically-based model predicts divergence in
  their grammars as well.
• If a speaker experiences a major change at the
  phonetic level (e.g. articulatory maturation),
  the grammar can change in response to the new
  phonetic pressures.
• Accounts for elimination of child-specific
  phonological phenomena in the course of typical
  maturation.
• I will propose a formal phonological model of
  Bens PFN pattern with roots in a child-specific
  articulatory limitation.

11
Child-specific phonetic limitations

• A phonetic difference between children and
  adults Children have difficulty moving the
  tongue independent of the jaw.
• Tongue is motorically complex, with many degrees
  of movement freedom (Kent, 1992).
• Control of the jaw, a bilaterally hinged joint,
  is motorically simple.
• In early stages of motor maturation, tongue moves
  passively with the active jaw (MacNeilage
  Davis, 1990).
• Even after some capacity for independent tongue
  control is acquired, acoustic measurements reveal
  an ongoing preference for jaw-dominated gestures
  (Edwards, Fourakis, Beckman, Fox, 1999)

12
Child-specific phonetic limitations

• My proposal Preference for jaw-dominated
  gestures takes on phonological status.
• Move-As-Unit Avoid jaw-independent tongue
  gestures.
• Move-As-Unit can be analogized to
  effort-minimizing constraints in adult grammars.
• Lazy Minimize articulatory effort (Kirchner,
  2001)
• MinimiseEffort (Flemming, 2001)
• Difference is that Move-As-Unit responds to a
  type of movement that is effortful for children
  but not for adults.

13
Why are fricatives dispreferred?

• In adult speech, fricative-containing syllables
  involve independent tongue and jaw control.
• In a fricative-vowel syllable, the jaw reaches
  its target before the tongue tip. (Tongue remains
  high to sustain frication while jaw lowers in
  anticipation of the upcoming vowel.)
• In a vowel-fricative syllable, the tongue tip
  reaches its target before the jaw (Mooshammer et
  al., 2006).
• A speaker who moves tongue and jaw as one unit
  cannot achieve this coarticulation.
• A typical coarticulated fricative-vowel or
  vowel-fricative transition will thus violate
  Move-As-Unit.
• Stops and glides do not require differentiated
  control of tongue and jaw (Kent, 1992).

14
Why the positional asymmetry?

• Spectrograms of Bens output reveal an asymmetry
  between initial and final fricatives
• Syllable-initial fricatives make an immediate
  transition into the following vowel.
• Syllable-final fricatives tend to be separated
  from the vowel by silence and/or aspiration
  noise.
• Pause separating vowel and coda fricative
  indicates that the gestures may not overlap at
  all.
• No Move-As-Unit violation.

15
Why the positional asymmetry?

• This pattern is not unique to Ben
• Target nose produced by a typically developing
  child aged 211

16
Why the positional asymmetry?

• Target kiss produced by a typically developing
  child aged 36
• Non-overlapping vowel-fricative transitions can
  be observed in the speech of typically developing
  children.

17
How general is the phenomenon?

• Measured 237 vowel-fricative and fricative-vowel
  transitions elicited from 17 TD children aged
  211-57 (mean 47).
• Average duration of silence/aspiration noise
  separating a vowel and a coda fricative was a
  substantial 88.4 ms.
• In 58.8 of tokens, this interval was 25 of
  total vocalic interval (criterion for
  preaspiration adapted from Gordeeva Scobbie,
  2010).
• This is despite the fact that adult American
  English is thought to lack preaspiration of
  fricatives (Turk, Nakai, Sugahara, 2006).
• There was no significant difference in the
  duration of silence/aspiration before a voiced
  versus a voiceless fricative.
• Between an onset fricative and the following
  vowel, the mean duration of non-canonical
  frication noise was 20.4 ms.
• Only 4.1 met criterion for postaspiration.

18
Why the positional asymmetry?

• Conclusion Child speakers produce
  fricative-vowel transitions with a greater degree
  of overlap than vowel-fricative transitions.
• Lesser Move-As-Unit violation in the latter case.
• However, evidence that fricatives and vowels do
  not always overlap in final position is
  insufficient to account for PFN.
• Necessary to explain why a comparable
  non-overlapped transition is not available in
  syllable-initial position.

19
Constraints on gestural timing

• Articulatory Phonology Gestures stand in
  characteristic timing relations with respect to
  one another (Browman Goldstein, 1986 et seq.).
• Characteristic patterns of gestural overlap can
  be encoded in Optimality-Theoretic coordination
  constraints (Gafos, 2002).
• CV-Coord Align(C, C-Center, V, Onset)
• VC-Coord Align(V, Release, C, Target)
• Non-overlapping transitions violate
  CV-Coord/VC-Coord
• If CV-Coord gtgt VC-Coord, non-overlapping gestures
  will be penalized more heavily in initial
  relative to final position.

20
Constraints on gestural timing

• Experimental evidence of syllable position
  effects suggests that CV-Coord gtgt VC-Coord may be
  the default.
• Degree of overlap between a vowel and a coda
  consonant varies with changes in rate or prosody,
  but onset-vowel transitions maintain stable
  timing across all conditions (Tuller Kelso,
  1990, 1991).
• Nam et al. (2010) CV and VC transitions have
  different coupling modes and consequently
  different coupling strength.
• CV coupling is in-phase (synchronous), more
  stable.
• VC coupling is anti-phase (offset by 180), less
  stable.
• Accounts for developmental and typological
  primacy of the CV syllable shape.

21
Modeling Bens grammar

• PFN will occur when CV-Coord gtgt Faith gtgt
  VC-Coord.
• Harmonic Grammar framework turns out to be the
  best fit for the data, but here classic OT is
  used for simplicity.
• Table 1. An initial fricative is replaced with a
  glide.

22
Modeling Bens grammar

• Table 2. A final fricative preserves faithful
  manner.

23
More evidence for the gestural account

• Before acquiring faithful fricatives in all
  contexts, Ben went through an intermediate stage
  (311-42) in which initial fricatives were
  realized with an epenthetic glide
• sj? saw sjak sock
• sja?t salt sjao? share
• sjo? sew ?jao? shell
• Epenthesis is a truly unexpected repair because
  Bens phonology at the time lacked initial
  consonant clusters, including obstruent-glide
  clusters.
• d?k clock bun spoon
• b?t bread d?s?n question

24
More evidence for the gestural account

• Articulatory Phonology literature reveals several
  cases where apparent epenthetic segments are the
  perceptual consequence of non-overlapping
  gestural coordination.
• Perceived epenthetic schwa in coda clusters in
  Moroccan Colloquial Arabic (Gafos, 2002).
• Perceived epenthetic schwa in English speakers
  attempted non-native clusters (Davidson, 2003).
• Vocal tract is briefly open during non-overlapped
  transition sound produced is perceived as an
  epenthetic segment.
• Transition from a vowel to a coda fricative has
  come to feature a palatal glide in some
  fully-developed phonologies, e.g. luz, light ?
  lujs in certain dialects of Brazilian
  Portuguese (Albano, 1999 Operstein, 2010).

25
More evidence for the gestural account

• If Ident-Consonantal is promoted above CV-Coord,
  the optimal candidate will feature a
  non-overlapped fricative-vowel transition instead
  of glide substitution.

26
More evidence for the gestural account

• So why dont we hear a transitional glide in
  Bens final vowel-fricative transitions?
• Visual inspection of coda fricatives shows
  cessation of voicing before onset of frication.
• Preaspiration obscures formant transitions that
  would create percept of epenthetic glide.
• Finding that glottal opening occurs in advance of
  the oral constriction for a fricative coda is
  entirely consistent with the gestural
  coordination analysis pursued here.
• Syllable position effects affecting timing of
  gestures within a compound segment (e.g. nasal,
  voiceless obstruent).
• In initial position, both gestures are roughly
  synchronous.
• In final position, glottal opening gesture tends
  to precede the oral constriction (Krakow, 1999).

27
Conclusions

• PFN is difficult to model without creating
  incorrect predictions for the range of variation
  in adult typology.
• Roots in childrens articulatory limitations can
  account for absence of pattern from adult
  grammars.
• Positional nature of fricative neutralization
  follows from the fact that inter-gestural timing
  is more tightly constrained in CV than VC
  contexts.
• Provides new evidence that patterns of
  inter-gestural coordination previously described
  in adult speakers are also influential in
  developmental phonology.

28
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