Experimentally-Elicited Articulatory Behaviour

One hundred and six English-speaking young children attempted to learn the production of three non-English phones. In their struggles to learn difficult new articulations, these children revealed interesting phonetic-phonemic behaviour, some of which seems to parallel natural articulation development and some which is not ordinarily observable outside an experimental setting. Observations and discussion relate specifically to vowel and consonant learning, age differences in sound learning, and certain characteristic resolutions of phonetic difficulties considered within a distinctive-feature framework.