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On What Might Constitute Learnable Phonology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Martin D. S. Braine
Martin D. S. Braine*
Affiliation:
New York University
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Abstract

A generative treatment of the early stages of development of two children suggests that the main learning process in pronunciation consists of discovering and gaining control over the articulatory features required to make sounds heard. The lexical representation differs from the phonetic output at all stages because actual pronunciations are constrained by primitive or acquired articulatory processes that have the effect of imposing a phonotactic filter on the speech output. Rules and representations depict ‘competence’ and have ‘psychological reality’ by describing the articulatory analysis made by the learner, together with the constraints imposed by the filter. The phoneme concept required is similar to Sapir's: no invariance or bi-uniqueness conditions are imposed, but phonemes are much more concrete than those of current generative phonology. The abstractness of the latter results from a methodology that enthrones economy criteria requiring assumptions about human memory and learning which are almost certainly wrong. Alternatives are discussed.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , June 1974 , pp. 270 - 299
Copyright
Copyright © 1974 Linguistic Society of America

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