Rhotacism

[Marilyn Vihman]

Mark -

A great many children avoid words with such phonemes for quite a
while. Estonian children rarely attempt words with trilled /r/ among
their first 50 or even 100 words - but there are always exceptions: I
have just been looking at the 1st 50 words of an Estonian child
described in an undergraduate thesis at Tartu University (Eeriku, in
Salo, 1993); this child not only did not avoid /r/ but actually
seemed to seekit out, producing syllabic trilled r (toru 'pipe',
terita 'sharpen' both > [trr] and clusters with r (traktor
'tractor' > trar, orav 'squirrel' > orr), such that out of the 49
words listed, 13 have /r/ in both target and child form! Of course to
fully support the idea that /r/ words are avoided BECAUSE they
include /r/ one needs an analysis of the input lexicon, which I don't
have to offer at the moment - but this may have been done for some
language(s) already, or could easily be done.

In English, among the hardest phones to produce are the interdentals.
When they do come in, typically around age 4, I believe, 'theta' may
be overgeneralized to words which should have /f/, presumably due to
misperception in the period of non-production: See my note in JChLg
1982. (I don't know how common words with theta are in early English
vocabularies - but probably not very. This again is common: The child
may not have to avoid many high frequency words due to phonological
problems, as the most common words may well be structured in a more
phonologically friendly way, as claimed by John Locke (1983).

-marilyn vihman

>A general question:  Does anyone know of any evidence that such 'problematic'
>phonemes effect L1 lexical aquisition?  Are words containing such
>phonemes (particularly
>at the beginning or end) more difficult for children to learn?  Or
>do they just
>happily substitute an easier phoneme and slowly correct this as they
>get older?
>
>Thanks,
>mark mitchell


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