Emma

At three and a half, Emma was almost incomprehensible to adults, even to her own mother, in continuous speech. She said bottle as BOP, match as BAP, drink as GIK, smoke as COKE, monkey as GUNKI, glove as DUD, finger as DINDA.  In this extreme disorder, no word seems to have more than one articulator. Every consonant in every word is said with the lips, the tip of the tongue, or the back of the tongue. These are commonly described as assimilations, as one well attested sort of process in child speech. But the assimilations in these and other words seem to go every logically possible way. And in some words, like match, glove and finger, not one sound is pronounced correctly.

In normally competent speech, sounds in words influence one another in both directions. For instance, in etcetera, the first T standardly dissimilates to a K by what Clare Galloway called a ‘cloth ear error’. And in anemone, the M and the final N commonly get switched around, so that the word sords like an enemy  or ANENOME. But Emma did this in every lexical word.

In normally competent speech, sounds are built in steps, in the framework assumed here, from very bare ‘underlying forms’, so that what the lexicon stores are only the barest skeletons of the form as pronounced. This keeps the lexicon as small as possible, although it imposes a high charge on the system of production and processing. (I argue in the proposal here that this is the only way that modern human speech could have evolved). One aspect of this is that the three main articulators are implemented in the order: lips, back of the tongue, tongue tip. But in respect of the consonants, that is the only thing Emma had correctly.

She had a system here, even though it was the most complex system in child speech that I have ever encountered. There were seven steps in her system. First she implemented a lip articulation so long as every other consonant was by a simple closure of the vocal tract and not part of a cluster with another consonantt, then back of the tongue of the tongue articulations were implemented subject to more conditions, then more conditions, then the same articulators in the same order but without conditons, and finally every articulation involves a stoppage of the airflow. This extreme complexity can look like inconsistency. But, as in Emma’s case, careful analysis can reveal a hidden system.

I found an outlandish parrot puppet which Emma loved to teach to talk. We gradually managed to teach the parrot to say the contrasts which Emma had at first found impossible to say, overcoming the assimilations one by one.