Early stage in language acquisition

[Joe Stemberger]

Gerald & Limor,

>
> I wanted to ask, does anyone know/found an early stage in acquisition in
> which children delete both coda and onset from a word and keep only the vowel
> (as a word)?

I assume that you're using the word "stage" to mean "a period of time",
with no implication that it's a step through which all children are
expected to pass.

And by "deletion", are you including use of initial glottal stops, where
e.g. the word LEG is pronounced [?e] ?  (This is usually lumped in as
pragmatically equivalent to deletion by English-speaking and
French-speaking speech-language pathologists, on the grounds that the
typical untrained English and French speaker can't hear the difference
between glottal stop and the true absence of a consonant, especially in
post-pausal position.)

We talk about this to some extent in our book, HANDBOOK OF PHONOLOGICAL
DEVELOPMENT (from Academic Press:  Bernhardt & Stemberger, 1998).

We note (p.370) that we've never come across total absence of onsets,
but that total absence of codas is common. It's not uncommon for a
particular onset consonant to delete or be replaced by glottal stop
(with /l/ and /h/ being common examples), but there are generally other
onset consonants (esp. oral stops) present in other words.

It is sometimes the case that older children with a phonological delay
or disorder has difficulty with onsets (pp. 435-436). Some of these
children have defaults that replace (almost) all target consonants (such
as [w] or [k]). Deletion (or more likely, replacement with glottal stop)
is also observed in really severely disordered systems, and clinical
assessment tools usually have a place for noting that. But it's
uncommon. And we haven't ever come across a child who actually deletes
all onsets. The closest we've seen is a child who variably replaces all
consonants with either a glottal stop or [h].

For the children that we've seen with severe onset problems, and for
most children in the literature,  coda development is usually much more
advanced.

But an occasional clinician has reported such a child to my co-author
(Barbara Bernhardt). And I believe that there was a report a few years
ago by Marie Therese Le Normand on a French-learning child who had only
vowels; we can't remember whether pains were taken to distinguish
glottal stops in the onset from true deletion.


---Joe Stemberger
University of British Columbia