A Japanese 4-year-old with protracted phonological development: the challenge of coronals

ABSTRACT

This study examines the phonology of a Japanese four-year-old with mildly protracted phonological development (PPD) as a contribution to a special crosslinguistic issue presenting individual profiles in PPD within the framework of constraint-based nonlinear phonology. Although the child’s word structure and vowels were well-established, certain consonant classes presented challenges. Coronal anterior obstruents often showed posteriorization (backing): dorsal stops replaced coronal stops, and with some exceptions, alveolopalatal affricates replaced anterior fricatives and affricates. The feature [+continuant] was also not yet established: palatal and bilabial fricatives and /h/ were either deleted or replaced with glottal stop; and non-anterior affricates replaced coronal fricatives. If affricates are analyzed as a sequence of [-continuant]-[+continuant], they were possible transitional elements from non-continuants to continuants. The profile culminates with suggestions for intervention based on the nonlinear phonological analysis, consistent with other papers in this special issue.

KEYWORDS:

• Acquisition
• phonology
• protracted speech
• Japanese
• phonetics

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank the child and his family for his participation and the speech-language pathologist in Tokyo, Yusuke Tabata. We are also grateful to one reviewer of the journal, Akiko Kuribayashi, and especially to Joseph Stemberger, for valuable comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

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Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ Whole Word Match indicates that all segments of a word match the adult target, with the exception of small details of phonetic placement or voicing.

² A nonlinear analysis form and the phonology test are free to download at phonodevelopment.sites.olt.ubc.ca/Test Materials/Japanese.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the JSPS [18H00666].