Nora Evelyn

Those of you not interested in linguistics may want to turn away for a moment.

Those of you interested in linguistics probably want to as well.

As of this morning I recognize several interesting tendencies in Nora’s grammar. I’m not stating anything formally (at least at this point) — just making some observations based on the (probably wrong) assumption that her productions and attempts at mimicry reveal as much about the underlying grammar as they do about her articulatory maturity.

• [d] is a phoneme.
• All oral stops are allophones of [d]
• [m] is a phoneme. All nasal stops are allophones of [m].
• [j] is a phoneme with allophone [l].
• [ʌ] is a phoneme with allophone [i]
• [a] is a phoneme with allophones [æ] and [e]
• [u] is a phoneme
• all syllables are CV
• all words have two syllables
• C₂ must match C₁ at least for nasality and sonority. Hard to tell much else if there really are as many allophones of each phoneme as it seems.
• V₂ has no such restriction.
• stress is word initial

It sure doesn’t seem like she’s doing the holistic word acquisition thing I’ve been led to expect.

Examples:
ducky > [dʌdə]
yeah yeah yeah > [jaja]
yeah > [jaja]
dude > [dudu]
daddy > [dada]
mommy > [mama]

“Where is [dʌdə]?” and “where is [dʌki]” evoke the same response (getting or pointing at the duck). “where is [dada]” and “where is [dadi]” cause her to look. In both cases she generally exclaims [dʌdə] or [dada] and then hugs the grateful object of interest.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 16th, 2009 at 10:27 am and is filed under language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.