Amy's fricatives

[pne]

Amy seems to be working on sorting out her fricatives.

She seems to have most difficulties sorting out [f], [s], and [S]; for example, she certainly has [f] in [fi] (Miffy), but "fish" is [SIS] (though her [S] is not quite my [S]; I'm not entirely sure what it is in IPA, though).

"Sophie" used to be ['fifi], but is now ['fisi]—so she's got the right fricatives now, but in the wrong order! (This also means that the vocative forms of "Sophie" and "Miffy" are now distinct :))

She also has [X] and [C] down (German Ach-Laut and Ich-Laut—probably allophones of one phoneme, say, /C/), in words such as [?oX] "hoch (up)", [bUX] "Buch (book, though with wrong vowel length and quality)", and [lIC] "Licht (light)".

For some reason, it amuses me that such a small child can pronounce [X]; I'm not sure whether that is because I consider it, somehow, a difficult sound, or whether it is because I talk to her in English and it's traditionally a difficult sound for monolingual English speakers to master.

Comments

[tungol.livejournal.com]

but "fish" is [SIS]

When my brother was little, he pronounced 'fishie' as [SISi] and 'horsie' as [SOSi] - sometimes it was hard to tell whether he was talking about a fish or a horse :-)

[pthalo]

It always sort of surprises me that little hungarian children can't pronounce w but have an easy time of "l". I know that w doesn't exist in theirl anguage, but they're so little, one would think they'd be able to do it... in fact, any adult makes a very similar sound when blowing out a candle, even if they can't produce it in speech. Hungarian children tend to replace "r" and "j" with "l". This is interesting to me, because Engilsh children tend to replace "r" and "l" with w. l is a harder sound, so they say "w", the easier one. I think "j" is a sound that English children master pretty early on, certainly before they master "l".

For example, last year, my friend Bálint who was 4 at the time said things like "visszaláló" instead of "visszajáró" But English children at the same age or more likely to say "I wike it" instead of "i like it".

[subbes]

OT, but: Got your card yesterday. Thanks, and happy season!

[pne.livejournal.com]

Thank you! Glad it arrived.