Outline & discuss the ways in which an infant's pronunciation deviates from the adult target language

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Dominic Davison

Outline & discuss the ways in which an infant’s pronunciation deviates from the adult target language

One of the ways in which infant’s pronunciation can deviate from the adult target language is via assimilation.

Assimilation is when a velar consonant, and anticipate the place of articulation. Sound anticipates some feature of the pronunciation of a following sound, or continues some features of a preceding sound, it is said to ‘assimilate’ to that sound. An Example of child assimilation is saying sam. An adults target is sam but the child will say nam. Another example is where the word is dog and the adults target word is dog and the child’s version is gog.  

The child does this because he is meaning to say the adult target version but he does not know how to make the movements in his mouth to make those sounds for in example, when the infant is saying nam instead of sam he is meaning to say sam but does not know how to make the ‘S’ part of sam. This is because the s requires you to stop air. The place of articulation that this takes part in is the alveolar where you put your tongue on the alveolar ridge to produce stop the air. This is a very complicated thing to do for an infant and requires a lot of practice before it can be mastered. The reason why he uses an n is because this sound is a lot easier to produce as it involves very little articulation control compared to the s.

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An extra way in which infant’s pronunciation can deviate from the adult target language is via addition.

Infant addition is where the infant adds a vowel onto the end of the word or replaces the end consonant with a vowel. The vowel is usually a,e,o or u and rarely an I. Examples of addition can be seen in the following;

The word is egg and phonetic adult target is eg and the child’s will be eg-“uh”. In this example the child has added a vowel u to make the “uh” sound. A second example will be the word apple ...

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