Unraveling phonological conspiracies: A case study

Abstract

This paper focuses on three seemingly unrelated error patterns in the sound system of a child with a phonological delay, Child 218 (male, age 4 years; 6 months) and ascribes those error patterns to a larger conspiracy to eliminate fricatives from the phonetic inventory. Employing Optimality Theory for its advantages in characterizing conspiracies, our analysis offers a unified account of the observed repairs. The contextual restrictions on those repairs are, moreover, attributed to early developmental prominence effects, which are independently manifested in another error pattern involving rhotic consonants. Comparisons are made with a published case study involving a different implementation of the same conspiracy, the intent being to disambiguate the force behind certain error patterns. The clinical implications of the account are also considered.