16.873, Review: Lang Acquisition/Phonology: Zamuner (2003)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-873. Wed Mar 23 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.873, Review: Lang Acquisition/Phonology: Zamuner (2003)

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1)
Date: 22-Mar-2005
From: Madalena Cruz-Ferreira < ellmcf at nus.edu.sg >
Subject: Input-based Phonological Acquisition 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2005 01:42:22
From: Madalena Cruz-Ferreira < ellmcf at nus.edu.sg >
Subject: Input-based Phonological Acquisition 
 

AUTHOR: Zamuner, Tania S.
TITLE: Input-based Phonological Acquisition
SERIES: Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics
PUBLISHER: Routledge (Taylor and Francis)
YEAR: 2003
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/14/14-1223.html


Madalena Cruz-Ferreira, Department of English Language and Literature, 
National University of Singapore

SUMMARY

This book presents research designed to assess two alternative hypotheses 
about language acquisition, one holding that child productions reflect 
universal properties of language, the other predicting child productions 
according to properties of the particular language to which the child is 
exposed. 

The book contains seven chapters, a 15-page Appendix with tabulation of 
data, and three indexes, by language, author and subject. Being a graduate 
research piece, the book will interest scholars in the field of child 
language acquisition, particularly phonological acquisition, and those 
concerned with evaluation of linguistic theories. 

Chapter 1, "Accounts of acquisition", starts by discussing the claim "that 
children's productions mirror cross-linguistic markedness" (p.4), unmarked 
properties of language being those that are cross-linguistically frequent, 
whereas marked features occur less frequently. 

Nature vs. nurture accounts of language acquisition are formulated in two 
contrasting hypotheses, the Universal Grammar Hypothesis (UGH), whereby 
acquisition is mediated by genetically-encoded properties of language that 
are universally unmarked, regardless of linguistic input, and the Specific 
Language Grammar Hypothesis (SLGH), whereby the unmarked patterns of the 
input language are the driving factor in acquisition, with no requirement 
for "innate _linguistic_ knowledge" (p.12). The empirical verification of 
the two hypotheses constitutes the focus of the book.

Zamuner highlights several of the theoretical and practical implementation 
problems that plague Universal Grammar (UG) accounts of language 
acquisition, such as the characteristic woolliness of definitions of the 
term "Universal Grammar" itself, or the circularity of much UG 
argumentation where, for example, "markedness is seen as both as [sic] 
evidence for UG and as the product of UG" (p.10). Most relevant for 
Zamuner's research is the systematic confounding, in UG claims about 
markedness, of cross-linguistic and language-specific features of 
language: if cross-linguistic markedness is derived from, and reflected 
in, properties of particular languages, then the assumedly innate, 
unmarked properties of language are also the unmarked properties of any 
particular language. It is this observation that prompts Zamuner's 
proposal of the SLGH.

The chapter goes on to review studies showing children's progressive 
sensitivity to input, including gradual disregard of non-phonemic 
contrasts in the surrounding language, or the earlier child production of 
consonantal codas in English than in languages with lower coda 
frequencies. The latter findings constitute the background to the present 
study, which investigates "the place [of articulation] and sonority of 
word-final codas in the domains of cross-linguistic markedness, the 
distribution of codas in English, and in coda acquisition in English. The 
aim is to determine whether children's productions reflect UG or the 
ambient language" (p.19).

Chapter 2, "Cross-linguistic codas", gathers together data from corpus-
based cross-linguistic research on codas, in order to enable a 
characterisation of preferred coda consonants and the related formulation 
of the UGH. The corpora consist of published research on codas across 
languages, and of Zamuner's own collection of CVC (consonant-vowel-
consonant) words across 35 languages, each from one of a variety of 
language sub-families. 

The set of possible codas and the number of word-final codas are tabulated 
for place of articulation and sonority, on the assumption that statistical 
analysis of word-final codas enables clarification of marked vs. unmarked 
features in this distributional position. Since cross-linguistic 
markedness is established on the strength of patterns observed from 
language processes, language change, child language, aphasia and phonemic 
frequency and is "interpreted here as evidence for UG" (p.22), markedness 
patterns will allow predictions about patterns in child language. 

Cross-linguistic word counts are then performed, using two different 
frequency analyses. An Expected Frequency Analysis (EFA) establishes 
whether "the words of a language contain a specific phonological element 
more than expected by chance" (p.24), and an Actual Frequency Analysis 
(AFA) establishes whether "the number of words containing codas with a 
specific phonological feature is greater than the words containing 
different features" (p.25). Overall findings are that coronal (vs. labial 
and dorsal) and sonorant (vs. obstruent) are the preferred place of 
articulation and sonority feature in codas, respectively. 

The chapter ends with remarks on the impasse faced by UG formulations of 
predictions about the markedness of particular phonemic segments, in view 
of these results. Namely, that some of the properties of a segment may be 
marked (e.g. obstruent) and some may be unmarked (e.g. coronal). In other 
words, "the unmarked features in coda position are not compatible" (p.34), 
leaving open the markedness status of, say, a coronal obstruent like /t/. 
A reasonable prediction for a UGH can nevertheless be formulated, that 
children's first codas are preferably coronal and preferably sonorant.

Chapter 3, "English codas", characterises the distribution of codas in 
English, in order to establish the features of the input to which children 
acquiring English are exposed, and thus enable a formulation of the SLGH. 
Data are gleaned from two online dictionaries, and from two databases 
containing words familiar to children through exposure and/or children's 
own use, namely, Fenson et al.'s (1993) MacArthur Communicative 
Development Inventories and a corpus of child-directed speech from CHILDES 
(MacWhinney 2000). Naturalistic interactions with children aged 1;7 to 2;4 
were sampled from the latter. 

EFA and AFA counts find consistency in the distribution of coda features 
in CVC words across all four databases. Zamuner then opts to base SLGH 
predictions on token CVC words from the CHILDES child-directed samples of 
speech, because token frequency has been shown to enable more accurate 
predictions about child productions than type frequency, and because child-
directed speech can arguably constitute the most appropriate data for 
forming predictions on acquisition, in that it closely reflects the 
phonological input available to English-learning children. The SLGH 
predicts that children's first codas will be those that are most common in 
the input, regardless of features like coronal or sonorant.  

The chapter then compares the predictions of both hypotheses. Given that 
both EFA and AFA across the four databases revealed a preference for 
coronal codas in English, children's early production of coronal codas 
could reflect either universal place of articulation preferences or the 
distribution of place of articulation in the ambient language. 
Specifically, /t, n, r, d/ codas are predicted by both hypotheses. 
However, EFA showed a larger proportion of sonorant codas than expected in 
English, whereas AFA showed a significantly greater number of obstruent 
than sonorant codas in the language. The latter finding is unsurprising, 
given the asymmetry in the inventories of English codas that favours 
obstruents in this position. Children's productions of sonorant and 
obstruent codas will then provide the relevant data upon which to decide 
between the two hypotheses.

The next three chapters provide data from (monolingual) English-speaking 
children. 

Chapter 4, "Child Language Codas", scans literature on phonological 
acquisition between the ages of 0;11 and 2;11 for data on child codas, due 
to unavailability of specific studies on the acquisition of codas in 
English. Child productions of codas in CVC words are then analysed in such 
a way as to maximise information pertinent to acquisition, using Stoel-
Gammon's (1985) Independent Analysis, which measures child productions 
with no reference to target forms, and Relational Analysis, which compares 
child productions to adult targets. Findings from both analyses are mixed: 
although both show child preference for /t, n, k, d/ codas, Independent 
Analysis has /m/ and Relational Analysis has /s/.

Zamuner then discusses the overall analytical difficulties raised by the 
disparate data concerning child codas, that generally conflate results for 
spontaneous productions and immediate imitations, word-medial and word-
final codas, or productions of content and function words. In addition, 
Zamuner invokes research of her own showing the need to control for the 
effects of prosodic position (stressed vs. unstressed syllable) on child 
coda productions, a further variable that is consistently disregarded in 
previous literature. The blurred nature of both data and findings patent 
from the review in this chapter justifies the set up of the experimental 
layout described in the two following chapters. 

Chapter 5, "Experiment 1" describes the first of Zamuner's own two 
experiments. A total of 17 children aged between 1;8 and 2;2 were tested 
for productions of codas in 70 monomorphemic CVC content words of English, 
of which 12 words were usable (due to the well-known vagaries of child 
behaviour in experimental settings). The age range was deemed 
representative of early coda emergence in child speech because "this is 
when children are both producing and deleting codas" (p.62). The vowels in 
different word sets were controlled for quality (lax vs. tense), and the 
words exemplify the set of possible English codas.

The children were first assessed about their knowledge of the words, and 
then prompted to produce them by naming pictures displayed on a computer 
screen. Only target-like coda productions in spontaneous words were 
tabulated, by means of a weighted statistic correcting for inequality in 
the children's productions. On the basis of the results from this 
experiment, Zamuner gives a first evaluation of the UGH and the SLGH. 
There was no evidence of preference for coronal or sonorant codas that 
might confirm the UGH, whereas the positive correlation between children's 
codas and the frequency of these codas in English confirms the SLGH 
prediction.

Chapter 6, "Experiment 2", reports a second experiment, designed to test 
phonotactic probability, or "the likelihood of sounds' occurrences" 
(p.81). The goal is to investigate child coda productions in different 
probabilistic contexts. Given previous research showing that infants, 
children and adults alike are sensitive to phonotactic probability, it is 
likely that child productions of the same coda will depend on its context. 
Zamuner accordingly devised a set of CVC non-word and near-non-word 
stimuli (the latter being actual words of English assumed to be of such 
low frequency that they could safely be taken as non-words for the 
children), with pairwise-matched codas. The phonotactic probability of 
each word was ascertained through the large body of research addressing 
this issue for the English language, and the experimental words were 
accordingly divided into two sets of 11 words each, one high-probability 
and one low-probability. 

A group of 29 children aged 1;8 to 2;4 (of which a subset also took part 
in Experiment 1) heard the pre-recorded words as names of pictures on a 
screen, and their task was to repeat them -- with experimental non-words, 
there can obviously be no question of spontaneous productions. Results 
show that children are significantly more likely to render the same coda 
accurately in those non-words that match high phonotactic probabilities of 
English than in those with a low phonotactic probability in the language.

Combined findings from the experiments in chapters 5 and 6 are that the 
distributional properties of the ambient language account best for the 
children's coda productions. Children will prefer to produce a coda not 
only because that coda is frequent in the input, but because its 
phonotactics are frequent too. The conclusion must then be that adequate 
predictions about phonological acquisition are best sought in an input-
based model.

Chapter 7, "Coda acquisition", reviews methodology, findings and 
conclusions in the book. It also describes a further experiment that 
replicates Jusczyk et al.'s (1994) findings about 9-month-old infants' 
preference for CVC non-words with a high phonotactic probability, but for 
the younger age of 7 months. These results bring additional insight into 
the central role played by features of the input language in early 
acquisition, reflected in children's first productions.

Given that the present study found no correlation between predicted and 
attested patterns according to the UGH, whereas the correlation holds 
firmly for the SLGH, Zamuner concludes that "children do not necessarily 
come to the acquisition task with prespecified knowledge" about features 
of language, but instead organise and build that knowledge "upon 
frequently occurring patterns in the ambient language" (p.99). 

EVALUATION

First, the bad news. The very bad news concerns the deplorable 
proofreading, if any at all, that the book underwent before publication. 
Typos, (near-)verbatim repetitiveness, awkward turns of phrase (often 
draft-like, some of which can be seen in material quoted in this review), 
non-sequiturs and/or nonsensical punctuation are a feature of virtually 
every page in the book, at times several times over. A benevolent reader 
is forced to re-read paragraphs or entire sections, in as many attempts to 
locate and hopefully resolve sources of garden-paths or misdirected 
reasoning. One major typo concerns a page duplicated in full, complete 
with footnote (pp.65-66). A sample of other examples is (page numbers on 
the left, emphasis added):

6. "voiced _stops_ are marked", for "obstruents"

14. "this is because [...], and _as_ children's initial productions"

16. "the analyses are restricted codas to final position"

22. "languages with codas in CVC words"

24. "[...] by considering expected frequencies, this controls for the fact 
that [...]"

26. "Arapaho (8)", where the presumed cross-reference (8) on p.33 gives a 
hypothesis, not a language sample

27. "a languages' unmarked place feature" and "Further evidence [...] are 
needed"

38. "[proper names were excluded] due to children having different names 
from popular culture"

61. "The _goal_ was to present children with real words containing a 
variety of codas", which is clearly a "method" instead

68. "further experiments would benefit from having and need to have a 
range of words types"

89. two blank spaces where a phonetic transcription should be

101. [children are better at] "producing sounds contained within words 
than are unanalysed forms, such as nursery rhymes [...]"

104. "most of the these approaches" 

etc. 

Clarification about conventions or data is given several pages after their 
introduction. For example, the use of the symbol "F", introduced on p. 53 
with what looks like a superscript cross-reference to a (non-existing) 
footnote, is first explained in another footnote on p.72 as 
an "unspecified fricative"; and we understand that the data given in Table 
3 (p.66) concern adult-like (vs. children's own) renditions of the tested 
codas only a few pages later, a distinction whose statistical relevance 
for discussion of child productions the previous chapter makes clear.

Repetitiveness, including summaries of summaries (e.g. pp.69-75 and the 
summarised overview in chapter 7), adds to the burden of reading. The 
reference to missing studies on coda acquisition in English is repeated 
nearly verbatim on pp. 49 and 61, as is the sentence beginning "An 
attempt..." (pp.62 and 84), and the verbatim formulation of the UGH (pp. 
34, 69, 96) and the SLGH (pp.42, 70, 96).

Recurring repetition of assumptions and research goals, and/or recurring 
references to these (e.g. pp.70, 71, 73 about preferences for coronal and 
sonorant codas) further compound an impression that each chapter is meant 
for independent reading, and that the book was put together not as a 
single, cohesive piece of research, but rather as a collection of 
autonomous research papers. (Chapter 6 of the book is the basis of Zamuner 
et al. (2004), and chapters 2, 3 and 4 of Zamuner et al. (2005).) 

Editorial sloppiness of this kind produces a cumulative effect of 
exasperation that risks detracting from content issues, to which I now 
turn. 

The good news are many and wide-ranging. The first thing that stands out 
is the fine scholarship that pervades the rigorous treatment of the data, 
whether concerning collection modes, statistical analysis or the 
interpretation of findings. Well aware that different researchers will 
favour different analytical choices for different kinds of data that serve 
different purposes, Zamuner takes the hard way of dissecting away from 
published research on child phonology and available databases the 
scattered information about syllable codas that can legitimately ground 
her own study. Her task was not made easier by the fact that most 
available data on early child productions fail to provide phonetic 
transcriptions (p.50). I, too, could not agree more that any understanding 
of language acquisition must rely on precise information about how young 
children sound. Incidentally, one very welcome feature of the book is that 
transcriptions use the standard IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) 
throughout. 

This book joins the growing body of literature on child language (Bybee, 
1998; Barlow & Kemmer, 2000; Leather & van Dam, 2002; Tomasello, 2003) 
that returns to the role that Saussure (1915/1969:37) ascribed 
to "parole", aptly translatable as 'language usage', in language 
acquisition: "c'est en entendant les autres que nous apprenons notre 
langue maternelle; elle n'arrive à se déposer dans notre cerveau qu'à la 
suite d'innombrables expériences" [is it through hearing others that we 
learn our mother tongue; it imprints itself on our brain only as outcome 
of countless experiences, MCF's translation]. The focus is on usage, and 
on the related insight that attempting to characterise properties of 
language without an understanding of the socialisation factors that shape 
those properties does not make much sense. On the evidence from syllable 
patterns, the "pressures to conform" (p.9) are found not in innate 
constraints dictated by universal properties of language(s), but in 
qualitative and quantitative properties of the specific input surrounding 
the child, for which the claim of a 'degenerate' status finds a very 
flimsy foothold indeed. 

In this sense, Zamuner's findings are commonsensical, almost trivially so 
when put into words: children will speak as they hear spoken. However, the 
apparently triviality of this claim dissolves against the persistently 
blurred nature of universalist claims about language acquisition, where no 
necessary causality is found between cross-linguistic recurrence, 
markedness and universalism, or between the latter and nativism, except 
axiomatically. Even for English, the single most widely analysed 
language, "it is not clear which information is relevant [...] for 
determining markedness or for determining the representation of final 
consonants" (p.18), which leaves undecided what the 'U' in 'UG' is meant 
to represent. Whether "sensitivity to UG" (passim, pass the paradox of 
sensitivity to what is assumed as an ineluctable biological development) 
might be triggered by some input from the environment appears to make 
little sense too. If children must generalise from the input, minimal 
though its contribution is traditionally claimed to be in UG 
argumentation, before some acquisitional parameter can be set, then the 
relevant pattern has de facto been learned through the input alone. This, 
in Tomasello's (2003:187) words, "basically leaves universal grammar with 
nothing to do", which in turn leaves undecided what the 'G' in 'UG' is 
meant to represent. In other words, universal grammar, or black holes, may 
do useful work in the minds of particular analysts, but this does not 
entail that they must inhabit the minds of human beings across the board.

One very pleasing feature of Zamuner's account is that she avoids sweeping 
generalisations, insisting that her findings apply to English, and to 
monolingual children acquiring it. In this connection, I wondered why the 
input-based hypothesis was not labelled, straightforwardly, "Input-Based 
Hypothesis". I believe that at least two reasons speak for this label. 
First, it is self-explanatory in a way that "Specific Language Grammar 
Hypothesis" (itself recycled from Zamuner's original "General Pattern 
Learning Hypothesis" in her dissertation) never became to me along the 
book. Parsing [Specific] [Language Grammar] makes obviously no sense, but 
the presumably intended parallel between [Universal] [Grammar] and 
[Specific Language] [Grammar] makes either the word "language" or the 
word "grammar" redundant. Second, and more importantly, "input-based" 
allows generalisation of the hypothesis to studies in child 
multilingualism, where features of "specific languages" may be of little 
help in accounting for patterns in multilingual child productions.

Another pleasing feature of the book is that Zamuner's style is never 
polemic. She is more interested in understanding what may explain what 
children do than in fuelling research paradigms with obedient data, or 
analytical controversies with rhetorical arguments. She provides robust 
empirical proof of the importance of the input in acquisition, points out 
matter-of-factly that UG makes wrong predictions, but then notes that 
neither the UGH nor the SLGH can claim to explain how children are 
sensitive to what their productions show them to be sensitive to: in this 
respect, both accounts remain equally in the dark. She also leaves open 
the issue that different interpretations of UG from the one that she 
adopts may give it the predictive strength that is found lacking in the 
book. This is a refreshing departure from the righteous stubbornness that 
often entrenches child language analysts in their own research paradigms, 
by choosing to remain deaf to alternative claims and argumentation. After 
all, Zamuner's findings are also that we learn to produce intelligible 
things because we listen to what is going on around us.

REFERENCES

Barlow, M. and S. Kemmer, Eds. (2000). Usage-based Models of Language. 
Stanford, CA, CSLI Publications.

Bybee, J. L. (1998). Usage-based phonology. In Darnell, M., E. Moravcsik, 
F. Newmeyer, M. Noonan and K. Wheatley, Eds., Functionalism and Formalism 
in Linguistics, vol. 1. Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 211-242.

Fenson, L., P. S. Dale, J. S. Reznick, D. Thal, E. Bates, J. P. Hartung, 
S. Pethick and J.S. Reilly (1993). The MacArthur Communicative Development 
Inventories: User's Guide and Technical Manual. San Diego, Singular 
Publishing Group.

Jusczyk, P. W., P. A. Luce and J. Charles-Luce (1994). Infants' 
sensitivity to phonotactic patterns in the native language. Journal of 
Memory and Language 33, 630-645.

Leather, J. and J. van Dam, Eds. (2002). Ecology of Language Acquisition. 
Amsterdam, Kluwer.

MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES Project (2 vols.). Mahwah, NJ, Lawrence 
Erlbaum Associates.

Saussure, F. de (1915/1969). Cours de Linguistique Générale. 3rd edition, 
Paris, Payot.

Stoel-Gammon, C. (1985). Phonetic inventories, 15-24 months: A 
longitudinal study. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 28, 505-512.

Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of 
Language Acquisition. Cambridge, MA/London, Harvard University Press.

Zamuner, T. S., L. Gerken and M. Hammond (2004). Phonotactic probabilities 
in young children's speech production. Journal of Child Language 31(3), 
515-536.

Zamuner, T. S., L. Gerken and M. Hammond (2005). The acquisition of 
phonology based on input: A closer look at the relation of cross-
linguistic and child language data. Lingua 115(10), 1403-1426. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Madalena Cruz-Ferreira teaches linguistics at the National University of 
Singapore. Her research interests include prosody and child 
multilingualism.





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