4 Phonological errors

Historically speaking, much of the theoretical interest has been directed at studying grammatical generalisation and over-generalisations. It is important to note however that errors are not restricted to grammar, but also seen in semantic, morphological and phonological development too. Some of the more common phonological patterns include the following:

• Reduplication: for example ‘bobo’ for ‘bottle’ and ‘dudu’ for ‘dummy’ – where there is complete or partial repetition of one of the syllables that replace the others.
• Consonant harmony: for example ‘tat’ for ‘cat’ and ‘dod’ or ‘gog’ for dog – where consonants in a word are harmonised to share a similar place or manner of articulation.
• Context sensitive voicing: for example ‘bat’ for ‘pat’ and ‘big’ for ‘pig’ – where all consonants at the start of the word are voiced.
• Devoicing: for example ‘pat’ for ‘pad’ and ‘bak’ for ‘bag’ – where all final consonants are voiceless.
• Fronting: for example ‘tar’ for ‘car’, ‘doat’ for ‘goat’ and ‘pid’ for ‘pig’ – where the place of articulation is moved more towards the front than usual.
• Final consonant deletion: for example ‘do’ for ‘dog’ and ‘mu’ for ‘mum’ – where the final consonant at the end of the word has been dropped.
• Cluster reduction: for example ‘pane’ for ‘plane’, ‘fag’ for ‘flag’, ‘poon’ for ‘spoon’ and ‘plash’ for ‘splash’ – where there is a reduction of a consonant cluster such as ‘sp’ or ‘fl’.
• Weak syllable deletion: for example ‘nana’ for ‘banana’ – when the unstressed syllable is dropped.
• Stopping: for example ‘pan’ for ‘van’, ‘dump’ for ‘jump’, ‘tun’ for ‘sun’ and ‘dat’ for ‘that’ – where fricatives are stopped and produced as plosives instead.
• Gliding: for example ‘wed’ for ‘red’, ‘yeyow’ for ‘yellow – where the /r/ sound becomes /w/ and /l/ becomes /y/ or /w/.
• Metathesis: for example ‘efalent’ for ‘elephant’.

The production and eventual disappearance of these errors is a normal part of development and for most children these characteristics start to decline in frequency around 2 years of age, with wide variation depending on the exact sounds (Vihman and Greenlee 1987). These phonological milestones can be used by speech and language therapists as a benchmark against which to gauge typical development. As with all errors, they give us important windows into the functioning of normal speech. For example, consonant and vowel harmony – where phonemes change to become more like the sounds around them – is part of everyday language use. ‘Good point’ without this process would be pronounced as/ gʊd|pɔɪnt/ whereas it is actually pronounced [gəbpɔɪnt] or ‘gub point’ where the alveolar plosive ‘d’ has anticipated the upcoming bilabial plosive ‘p’ and turned itself into another bilabial plosive ‘b’. This process represents a delicate trade-off the linguistic system plays between minimising the distance the articulatory apparatus needs to travel while maximising the intelligibility of what is being said.