| ROA: | 681 |
|---|---|
| Title: | Phonological disorders in the light of constraints |
| Authors: | Giovana Ferreira-Goncalves |
| Comment: | Presented at Second Lisbon Meeting on Language Acquisition, Lisbon, 2004. |
| Length: | |
| Abstract: | The present paper seeks to ponder on how OT understands speech disorders and on the contributions that this constraint-ba sed model can make to the description, analysis and treatment of them. It also seeks to comment on the efficacy of OT in making explicit the implicational relations proposed by Implicational Model od Features Complexity (Mota, 1996). Through the analysis of the data of 25 Brazilian phonologically disordered children, Mota (1996) found implicational relations among the distinctive features which lead to different possibilit ies in the development of consonantal segments during the acquisition process. Considering the subjects' performance in what concerns the distinctive features involved in each of the consonantal segments observed, the author proposed a table of implicational relationships among features. By means of the application of OT to some aspects of Mota's work, we have tried to demonstrate that the theory is able to effect a rereading of the analyzed data in a more satisfactori ly way, allowing for the 'visualization' of phonological disorders from 'within' the linguistic system. The data seem to indicate that phonologically disordered children do not present difficulty in the demotion of individual constraints which constitute universal subhierarchies, for they evidence in their system the several distinctive features constituting the segments of Brazilian Portuguese. As it was also observed that the excess of variation presented by the phonologically disordered learner seems to be related to the late acquisition of the segments, since according to the architecture of OT the slow demotion of constraints leads to the construction constraint-sharing strata. The importance that should be given by the analyst to the constraint sharing strata must, therefore, be emphasized although it must be stressed that the best speech therapy is not always the one which seeks to dismember them, for the demotion of fixed constraints, ranked a bit higher, may be more efficient in the treatment, by means of generalization. It must be also stressed that the discussion of certain aspects which characterize disordered speech, and which used to be discussed 'on the side of' theoretical models, can now be supported in the own architecture of the theory. |
| Type: | Paper/tech report |
| Area/Keywords: | Phonology,Language Acquisition |
| Article: | Version 1 |