UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 9 (1997)
Prosody and melody in vowel
disorder
SALLY BATES, JOHN HARRIS & JOCELYNNE WATSON
The paper explores the syllabic and segmental facets of phonological vowel disorder. The
independence of the two dimensions is illustrated by the case study of an English-speaking
child
presenting with a vowel impairment which can be shown to have a specifically syllabic basis.
His
rendition of adult long vowels displays three main patterns of deviance -- shortening,
bisyllabification and the hardening of a target off-glide to a stop. Viewed phonemically, these
patterns appear as unconnected substitutions and distortions. Viewed syllabically, however,
they
can be traced to a single underlying deficit, namely a failure to secure the complex nuclear
structure necessary for the coding of vowel length contrasts.
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