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This paper addresses how input variability in the adult phonological system is mastered in the output of young children in Akan, a Kwa language spoken in Ghana, involving variability between labio-palatalized consonants and front rounded vowels. The high-frequency variant involves a complex consonant which is expected to be mastered late, while the low-frequency variant involves a front rounded vowel which is expected to be mastered relatively early. Late mastery of complex consonants was confirmed. The high-frequency labiopalatalized-consonant variant was absent at age 3 and not yet mastered even at age 5. All children produced the easier-to-produce low-frequency front-rounded-vowel variant, most at far greater frequency than in adult speech, implying that a child's output limitations can affect which variant the child targets for production. Modular theories, in which phonological plans reflect only the characteristics of adult input, fail to account for our results. Non-modular theories are implicated.

A crosslinguistic study is underway concerning children's protracted phonological development (i.e. speech sound disorders). The current article reports pilot Spanish data for this study from two 4-year-old boys with protracted phonological development. The purposes of the pilot study were to: (1) develop and evaluate a word list for elicitation that could be used across Spanish dialects and that sufficiently sampled Spanish word lengths, stress patterns, word shapes and phonemes; and (2) to derive hypotheses for the larger study, based on patterns found in these children's speech, and a review of the literature. The two speakers showed some developmental patterns reported for other languages (e.g. constraints on production of liquids and word-initial consonants in unstressed syllables) but also patterns that may reflect Spanish phonological inventories, allophony and frequencies. These data helped consolidate the Spanish word list for elicitation and led to questions for the ongoing study concerning word structure, multisyllabic words, liquids, fricatives and vowel sequences. (Contains 4 tables and 7 notes.)

This paper investigates the effect of the repetition of phonological elements on accuracy in spontaneous language production. Using a corpus of naturalistic speech errors, it is shown that repetition of a whole segment doubles the error rate on the second token (a perseveratory effect), for onset consonants, vowels, and coda consonants; the effect is present (at a reduced magnitude) in the speech of young children. Repetition also leads to an increased error rate on the first token (an anticipatory effect), but only for word-initial consonants and only for adults. Repetition of subsegmental features has an effect only for word-initial consonants and only perseveratorily. There are no effects of repetition of larger units (e.g., syllable onsets) or for general segmental similarity. It is argued that the effect is largely due to mechanisms designed to prevent perseveration (by e.g., shifting average activation values downward), and affects early-accessed information (whole segments; onset consonants) more than later-accessed information (subsegmental features; vowels and coda consonants). (Contains 13 tables and 1 figure.)

Overtensing (the use of an inflected form in place of a nonfinite form, e.g. *"didn't broke" for target "didn't break") is common in early syntax. In a ChiLDES-based study of 36 children acquiring English, I examine the effects of phonological and lexical factors. For irregulars, errors are more common with verbs of low frequency and when phonological processing biases favour the past-tense form relative to the base form (vowel dominance and the consonant addition bias). For regulars, errors are more common when the inflected form ends in a rime that can occur in monomorphemic forms in English (which children have had independent practice with) than when the rime is found only in inflected forms. Results demonstrate that default patterns can be subject to lexical frequency effects. Results are compatible with a particular conceptualization of competition (the integrated multiple competitor approach), whether connectionist or symbolic.

It has been shown that the processing of irregular past-tense forms is affected by phonological factors that are inherent in the relationship of the past-tense forms to other words in the lexicon (rhyming families of irregulars) or to their base forms (vowel dominance effects). This paper addresses more ephemeral phonological effects. In a sentence-production task, the vowel of the base form or past-tense form of an irregular verb is primed by an identical vowel in the subject noun (e.g., base vowel "cream," past-tense vowel "chrome," unrelated vowel slot). For verbs with different vowels in the base form and past-tense form, phonological priming of the base vowel or of the past-tense vowel increases the rate of overregularization errors such as "*freezed" as compared to an unrelated vowel prime. For verbs with the same vowel in the base and past-tense forms (e.g., "hit/hit"), phonological priming has no effect on the rate of overregularization errors. It is argued that irregular forms are not produced in a specialized subnetwork for (irregular) past-tense forms, but are produced in the general lexical system simultaneous with general phonological processing. Implications for theories of inflectional morphology are discussed.

Models of speech production differ on whether phonological neighbourhoods should affect processing, and on whether effects should be facilitatory or inhibitory. Inhibitory effects of large neighbourhoods have been argued to underlie apparent anti-frequency effects, whereby high-frequency default features are more prone to mispronunciation errors than low-frequency nondefault features. Data from the original SLIPs experiments that found apparent anti-frequency effects are analysed for neighbourhood effects. Effects are facilitatory: errors are significantly less likely for words with large numbers of neighbours that share the characteristic that is being primed for error (''friends''). Words in the neighbourhood that do not share the target characteristic (''enemies'') have little effect on error rates. Neighbourhood effects do not underlie the apparent anti-frequency effects. Implications for models of speech production are discussed.

In morphological processing in adult speech, irregular forms are subject to several types of errors, including overgeneralization and overtensing. A morphonaming task found that probability of these errors is affected by a phonological factor that derives from vowel phoneme frequencies in a complex fashion: whether the vowel in the past tense form is dominant relative to the vowel in the base form or recessive relative to the base vowel. (Author/VWL)

This paper addresses the phonology of a Swedish girl, aged 3 years 10 months, with extensive phonological difficulties that include an unusual phonological pattern. She had relatively well-developed phonological building blocks in terms of features, stress pattern and word length (number of syllables), but had extensive difficulties regarding syllable and word shapes, with frequent deletions of both segments and whole syllables. Word-initial position was dominated by non-continuant consonants, both voiced and voiceless, with extensive deletion. Word-medial position was dominated by voiceless obstruents, with extensive use of [j] in place of voiced consonants. Word-final position was similar to word-medial, but with more deletion than [j]. Non-initial stressed syllables resemble word-initial syllables. Consonant clusters mirrored singletons, i.e. with similar substitution patterns or deletions. We present a non-linear analysis of her speech production, and a plan for intervention targeting her special difficulties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses how input variability in the adult phonological system is mastered in the output of young children in Akan, a Kwa language spoken in Ghana, involving variability between labio-palatalized consonants and front rounded vowels. The high-frequency variant involves a complex consonant which is expected to be mastered late, while the low-frequency variant involves a front rounded vowel which is expected to be mastered relatively early. Late mastery of complex consonants was confirmed. The high-frequency labiopalatalized-consonant variant was absent at age 3 and not yet mastered even at age 5. All children produced the easier-to-produce low-frequency front-rounded-vowel variant, most at far greater frequency than in adult speech, implying that a child's output limitations can affect which variant the child targets for production. Modular theories, in which phonological plans reflect only the characteristics of adult input, fail to account for our results. Non-modular theories are implicated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When children produce regularizations like "comed," not all verbs are equally liked to be regularized. It is argued that one predictor is which vowels are present in the base form vs. the past tense form, and that regularizations are likely when the base vowel is dominant and unlikely when the past tense vowel is dominant. (Contains 25 references.) (Author/LB)

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2007.02.003 Byline: Joseph Paul Stemberger Keywords: Morphology; English past-tense; First language acquisition; Overtensing; Phonology-morphology interactions; Frequency effects; Regularity; Language production; Dual route models; Connectionist models; Symbolic models Abstract: Overtensing (the use of an inflected form in place of a nonfinite form, e.g. adidn't br o ke for target didn't br ea k) is common in early syntax. In a ChiLDES-based study of 36 children acquiring English, I examine the effects of phonological and lexical factors. For irregulars, errors are more common with verbs of low frequency and when phonological processing biases favour the past-tense form relative to the base form (vowel dominance and the consonant addition bias). For regulars, errors are more common when the inflected form ends in a rime that can occur in monomorphemic forms in English (which children have had independent practice with) than when the rime is found only in inflected forms. Results demonstrate that default patterns can be subject to lexical frequency effects. Results are compatible with a particular conceptualization of competition (the integrated multiple competitor approach), whether connectionist or symbolic. Author Affiliation: Department of Linguistics, University of British Columbia, E270-1866 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z1 Article History: Received 5 May 2005; Revised 16 February 2007

Regularly inflected forms often behave differently in language production than irregular forms. These differences are often used to argue that irregular forms are listed in the lexicon but regular forms are produced by role. Using an experimental speech production task with adults, it is shown that overtensing errors, where a tensed verb is used in place of an infinitive, predominantly involve irregular forms, but that the differences may be due to phonological confounds, not to regularity per se. Errors involve vowel-changing irregular forms more than suffixing inflected forms, with at best a small difference between regular -ed and irregular -en. Frequency effects on overtensing errors require a model in which the past-tense and base forms of the verb are in competition and in which activation functions are nonlinear, and role out models with specialized subnetworks for past-tense forms. Implications for theories of language production are discussed. Keywords: Morphology; Language production; Errors; Dual-mechanism models; Past tense; Activation functions