engleski

Sound acquisition terms in linguistics and language of general public

Language acquisition is an important theoretical and applied field of research (especially in general and clinical phonology, and psycholinguistics), but it is also a very popular topic for the general public, starting with the parents and relatives of infants and young children. Phonological development plays a very important role in the first years of a child’s life, as this is a sensitive period that has been widely studied in phonology (e.g., Flege et al. 1999). In this paper, we discuss the terminology of sound acquisition in children, which consists of normal systematic changes that can affect an entire category of phonemes and then gradually disappear as children grow older. The aim is to identify and describe the relationships between terms that describe different phonological errors. Naming the phenomenon itself is challenging: phonological processes (e.g., Stampe 1979), phonological patterns (e.g., Hodson 2004 ; Bernthal et al. 2017), or phonological errors (e.g., Dodd et al. 2003), the latter is sometimes distinguished from the former and attributed to language delay or a phonological disorder. The terms discussed in this paper include synonyms such as reduplication vs. doubling, elision vs. deletion, which can also consist of one word vs. two words or three words: liquid simplification vs. deliquiding, consonant cluster reduction vs. cluster reduction ; polysemic names such as hyperonym assimilation and assimilation as one of the hyponyms ; paronyms such as duplication vs. reduplication or deletion vs. omission ; names that appear semantically transparent, e.g. duplication, reduplication, stopping ; and those that are difficult to pronounce and memorise, e.g., coalescence. Thus, duplication can be a synonym for reduplication (and then it is redundant), it can be an academic synonym (a word more commonly used by scholars), but it can also be a paronym: reduplication is the repetition of a word or part of a word to form a new one (‘to double, to do something again’), while duplication can exclude the first identical element. Synonymous terms will also be discussed because they describe the same process from a different point of view or assign a different theoretical approach. For example, stopping means replacing fricatives and affricates with stops ; deaffrication means replacing affricates with fricatives or stops ; alveolarization means replacing non-alveolar sounds with alveolar sounds. If the child pronounces tips instead of chips, or too instead of shoe, the question is whether this is stopping, deaffrication, or alveolarization and whether it is meaningful to non-specialists. The differences between the scientific terms that have theoretical implications and the terms for the general public will also be discussed, both within a language and between languages. Sometimes it is problematic to translate national terminology into English as an international language, since not all terms developed in one language have a true English equivalent, e.g. fonološka odstupanja, lit. ‘phonological deviations’, should perhaps be better translated as ‘phonological inaccuracies’. And when new national terms are introduced, they need to be translated into English, as it is an international language of communication, e.g. deliquidizing, deliquiding.

sound acquisition ; terminology ; English ; Croatian

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