11 April 2005 Class notes on: Dinnsen, D. A., & Chin, S. B. (1993). Individual differences in phonological disorders and implications for a theory of acquisition. In F. R. Eckman (Ed.), Confluence: Linguistics, L2 acquisition, and speech pathology (pp. 137-152). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Kirk Baker Pretty straightforward. Main point I got was 4 logica possibilites between phonological and phonetic representations; the on I'd never thought about was correct phonetic output possible fro incorrect underlying rep. p. 147 "specifies a series of implicational relationships" which aren't the same implications as Rice & Averyp.31. Data in the form of <5 children to support either view.. Junko Davis "In a recent study (Dinnsen and chin 1988), the phonological systems of 40 young children with moderate to severe functional (nonorganic) speech disorders were examined." (p.141) "the principles governing disordered systems do not differ from those governing developing or established systems." (p.150) -- We just talked about the range of individual variation discussed in Vihman (1993). What is the difference between children having a disorder and children exhibiting individual variation? Also, there is one clarification question. Is it correct to interpret "speech disorder" here as meaning articulation disorder? I am sure that they have a well controlled the subject pool, so I am assuming that the subjects in the studies that appeared in the article speak Standard American English as their primary language. For instance, it occurred to me when I looked at the example (3d) in p.144 that this example may not necessarily be "incorrect" in a certain dialect speech community. Kathleen Currie Hall Summary: In this paper, Dinnsen and Chin argue that studying children with phonological disorders can shed light on linguistic theory and acquisition, and that linguistic theory should be spplied more to the understanding of phonological disorders. They show that "disorders" can stem from various sources that appear to be cognitive/linguistic in addition to physical/motor and that at the same time, disorders are limited in ways that may reflect universals of language learning. Details: 1. "Errors" by phonologically disordered children generally are systematic and can often be described by rules relating them to the adult system. 2. However, it is not the case (as is often assumed) that children necessarily have the correct (i.e. adult) underlying representations and simply mis-map from these to their phonetic realizations. Instead, children may have correct or incorrect URs and may have various phonological rules that map from these URs to correct or incorrect surface realizations. They show evidence from studies where all four cases hold. 3. This has consequences for speech pathology, etc., in that the problems that children have may come from all sorts of different sources, and strategies to help children (at least at the time of the article) did not address many of these sources, since many of them are based around linguistic structural organization. 4. They also present evidence from cross-sectional studies showing that phonetic inventories of disordered children fit neatly into a typical typology of inventories that are implicationally structured -- if sounds of type Y are present, then the child must have mastered sounds of type X. They claim that these inventories follow the same patterns as those of non-disordered children, which is indicative of some sort of more universal linguistic structure, and that these patterns have implications for helping disordered children in that teaching them more "complex" sounds should automatically give them the ability to deal with simpler sounds. Questions / Comments: 1. p. 141 -- What are "functional" / "nonorganic" speech disorders? 2. How do they know for sure what the URs actually are? Sometimes it's more or less clear that there's an alternation in some cases, and one could figure it out. But what about e.g. p. 141 (2a) -- how do they know that there's a rule of aspiration and it isn't the case that the child has aspirated stops underlyingly? 3. NB that their implicational hierarchy of sounds matches fairly well with the deterministic hierarchy supported by Rice and Avery. Coronal/labial split is first in terms of place; it is implicational/deterministic. Have there been longitudinal studies showing children actually moving from one type to another? Has there been success at teaching complex sounds to automatically get simpler ones? Eunjong Kong Linguistic theory should be able to describe the system of disordered language or L2 speech as a part of natural language, because their variations are governed by universal/lg-specific constraints and they can be explained by using levels of representations in phonological theory. - Linguistic variations found in phonologically disordered speech can be analyzed as the results from combinations of correct/incorrect UR and presence/absence of phonological rule applications. (The Key assumption here made based on emperical data is that UR can be incorrect.) - Phonetic inventories of misarticulating children are somehow constrained as well as varied: each inventory is fit into a certain level determined by complexities of distinctive features consitituting each inventory. Changed inventory after treatment is also one of those sets of categoirzations. questions: 1.How do we determine UR based on the production data? Are we assuming that the phonetic represenations are a direct mirror that shows us what people with speech disorder have as UR? 2.Among 4 combinations between incorrect/correct UR and non- application/application of rules, is errors caused by 'incorrect UR' as bad as errors caused by 'non-application of rules'? (a similar quesion is addressed at the top of P 146, I later found. Any progress on this quetion since 1993?) Fangfang Li Outline: This paper tries to argue that phonological disorders represent the kind of variability in language acquisition that is also within the realm of natural language. Moreover, studying the disordered systems can shed light upon the limits of natural language and also reveal its structure and organizations. Questions: 1. (pp. 139) in case (1), where Subject A consistently omits the word-final obstruent but maintain it word-internally, it is argued that this child has correct underlying representation, but flawed in rule application. Couldn't it be that the child actually does not have the correct underlying representation in word-final position, and those correct data in word-internal position can be accounted for by failure to form connections between morphologically related words? 2. (pp. 144) in (3c), it is interpreted that the child has wrong underlying representation of English plural marker, since "it is generally assumed for English that the plural morpheme is represented underlyingly as /z/". This assumption is arguable to me for this kind of phoneme with allophonic alternations. And I don't see why we can't treat /s/ as the underlying representation. The thing is if the underlying representation is /s/, then it is not the underlying representation that goes wrong, but rather it is the lack the allophonic rule. And the whole analysis would go the other way round thus. Comments: The five-level inventory is interesting since it resembles remarkly the Locke(1983)'s notion of "repertoire sounds", and also shares some similarities with the Rice and Avery's model of acquisition, although the former focuses on features and the latter on contrasts with more variability. However, Dinnsen and Chin only talks about English-acquiring children with phonological disorders, and it would be interesting and more implicational if a cross-linguistic study can be done in the same manner. Ila Nagar 1. This might be a na•ve question for most of us and I should know this myself, but in any case I will raise it. Are underlying representations not constant? When I was reading this article I was confused about surface and underlying representations and the way the authors talk about these. 2. Page 140: Does vowel length directly relate to an awareness of deletion/ Can it not be a manifestation of different vocabulary items stored in the childŐs mind? 3. Page 140: What is the size of the corpus from which error patterns are derived? 4. Page 146: Can phonological variation not be a result of different shapes of the vocal tract? Especially in case of learning challenged children who also might have other difficulties to face in terms of biological developments? The authors do not discuss this at all. 5. Page 149: What kind of treatment do the children receive? 6. Page 149: How does evidence of variation in phonological features among learning challenged children help understand language variation in change? Do the authors mean to say that that would enhance our understanding of the directions in which a particular variation can go? 7. Can more research in languages other than English help throw more light on issues like vowel length and its relationship with underlying representations/ Helen Riha p. 138 "(David Ingram's) work has revealed that children's errors can be described by phonological rules (or processes) that express a systematic relationship with the target." The same can be said of speech errors. They can also be described in terms that would show a systematic relationship with the target. In the same vein as Dinnsen and Chin's claims about disordered speech in children, speech errors are also not "deviant in nature and thus unlike any other language system" (p. 138). They can be, and have been, used to inform linguistic theory. p. 139 The examples in (1) show more interesting patterns than the authors discuss. Based on Subject A's speech sample, we can surmise that final obstruents may not yet be salient for the child and that he therefore omits them. Final [r] is salient for him, however, and he does not omit it but rather produces it as a labiodental approximant (the same substitution is made by Subject 13 on p. 141). The subject also realizes that words and/or syllables can have final consonants, as evidenced by the presence of the labiodental approximant. In the case of Subject C, in two-syllable words, medial obstruents are not salient and are deleted, but the vowels in both syllables are salient and are maintained. The nasal in 'eating' is also salient and is produced as [n]. It seems that both Subject A and Subject C's deficiencies can be explained in terms of the sonority hierarchy and the position of the segment in the word. More sonorous segments (vowels, liquids, nasals) tend not to be deleted, and less sonorous segments are maintained only in word-initial position. p. 140 "These results demonstrated that a given error pattern can derive from either correct or incorrect underlying representations." What about the subjects' sensitivity to syllable structure and word structure? Awareness of syllables and their structure and words and their structure is never mentioned by the authors as being a factor in subjects' acquisition of phonology. p. 140 "It is an empirical issue whether such variation actually occurs. If it does, linguistic theory will have motivated a refocusing away from error patterns alone to the child's total system, which includes both correct and incorrect productions." If children do go through a system of hypothesis formulation, testing, and evaluation as proposed by the cognitive model mentioned in Rice and Avery (1995), they would indeed have incorrect productions as they progress through those stages to arrive at correct forms. p. 145 "Phonological theory reeals speech disordered systems to be highly differentiated as a result of appeal to very basic linguistic constructs, namely the nature of a child's underlying representations and the application or nonapplication of a phonological rule." Children's knowledge of segments in combinations (i.e., in syllables, words, and phrases) also needs to be considered in understanding their speech disorders because children do not learn segments in isolation. As noted by Menn and Stoel-Gammon (1995), children's "earliest phonological 'units' appear to be whole words" (p. 345). Children's knowledge of other levels of grammar also needs to be taken into account in understanding their phonological development, but Dennison and Chin do not mention children's acquisition of higher levels of grammar as a factor influencing phonological disorders. p. 150 "The resemblances (between English and disordered systems) are attributable to the constraints that govern all language systems and the selective attention of the acquirer on a prominent but independent property of the phonology." It would be interesting to see what kind of errors children with phonological disorders *never* make as a way to obtain clues about language universals. The resemblances the authors mention are also based on general cognitive principles that guide our thinking. As suggested by Dinnsen and Chin, children with phonological disorders arrive at their linguistic productions through sensible processes of reasoning. Laura Slocum Comments/Questions: I absolutely agree with Dinnsen and Chin that second-language and "atypical" learners should be an active part of discussions regarding child language and phonological acquisition. In any study, analysis of errors can lead to interesting findings. Why then should this information be excluded from the body of theoretical literature in speech, hearing and linguistics? I found the authors' discussion of "underlying mental representations" versus "phonological rules" versus "phonetic representations" interesting (and, at times, dizzying). I guess my primary concern with their explanation has to do with the difference between "descriptive" and "prescriptive" and whether we can legitimately claim a child's way of knowing through observations of behavior. Most children learn a sound in a particular word position and then generalize to other positions. Additionally, some children produce "idiosyncratic" errors when producing particular words. Are Dinnsen and Chin claiming that all disordered systems can be explained by underlying representation and the application of phonological rules? Where do "phonetic" (articulatory) errors fit into this discussion? Asimina Syrika -How do you know what is the underlying representation of the child? Is it necessarily the same as the adults'? Dinnsen and Chin seem to take this for granted without accounting for the child's own perception of input (both from others and themselves). What would be a good way to measure this perception and thus be able to make more reliable predictions about the true nature of children's underlying representations?