Default unstressed initial syllable? re-

[Joe Pater]

Hi Lynn and others,
Smith (1973) reports the same thing for his son Amahl - and the dummy  
syllable was also [ri]!

Gnanadesikan's (2004) daughter Gitanjali used [fi] in this position"for  
almost a year".

She has some speculation (p. 103, fn. 14) on why this phenomenon is  
rarely reported:

"...it might be that a child with nonlinguist parents would experience  
such a lack of parental comprehension in the face of a dummy syllable  
that she would be highly motivated to switch to almost any other  
grammar that she was developmentally ready for. Dummy syllables might  
therefore occur in a number of children, but be rapidly suppressed."

Not sure if I buy this though, since lots of other child phonology  
makes speech difficult to interpret, and this is probably no more  
difficult to interpret than outright truncation. And now that we have  
four cases, it's seeming less rare!

Best,
Joe.

References
Gnandesikan, Amalia. 2004. Markedness and faithfulness constraints in  
child phonology. In R, Kager, J. Pater and W. Zonneveld, eds.  
Constraints in Phonological Acquisition. CUP. 73-108.

Smith, Neilson V. 1973. The Acquisition of Phonology: A Case Study. CUP.

On Jan 10, 2005, at 12:39 PM, Lynn Santelmann wrote:

> First, let me confess that this is a purely personal question,  
> inspired by my son's language weirdnesses --
>
> My son (age 3 1/2) is finally acquiring unstressed initial syllables.  
> The odd thing is that he seems to have a "default" unstressed  
> syllable, namely "re-". So, at our house we "remember" and "reget". I  
> am a "refessor". We go to "reseums".
>
> I'm not sure if this is a resurgence of an earlier phase of "over-re"  
> use – about a year ago, we talked about "recycling retrucks",  
> "recycling rebins", "recycling reguys", or if it's a different thing.  
> The earlier re- use came and went spontaneously in about a month, this  
> one is hanging around a bit longer.
>
> Neither use of re is something I've ever read about, and my quick lit  
> check didn't reveal anything either. Does anybody have any literature  
> on this? And could it be related to the somewhat sketchy  
> representation he seems to have for a lot of new words – we're getting  
> a lot of malaprops these days (snowflags for snowflakes, Dora the  
> Exploder, etc.)
>
> Thanks
>
> Lynn
>
> *********************************************************************** 
> ****************
> Lynn Santelmann, Ph.D.
> Associate Professor, Applied Linguistics
> Portland State University
> P.O. Box 751
> Portland, OR 97201-0751
> phone: 503-725-4140
> fax: 503-725-4139
> e-mail: santelmannl at pdx.edu (that's last name, first initial)
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