so let's talk about training we all need
to polish our skills before we can do
anything just right and the more fine
and complicated the task the more
practice we need to count ourselves as
full members of the band and when you
have to attempt the delicates symphony
of movements that go into producing
language sounds you know there's going
to be some crashing around at first but
there can still be some rhyme and reason
to how we crash I'm moti Lieberman and
this is the Ling space
welcome to the Ling space
babies come into the world all ready to
go for learning language trying to
listen to the enormous wealth of words
and sentences around them and compile
the solid grammar but producing language
is a totally different thing we're not
ready for that at all let's look beyond
the fact that little baby heads actually
need to restructure themselves before
infants can really make speech sounds
and let's also look beyond the babbling
stages as interesting as those cute
little syllables can be know today we
want to look at what's going on with
kids when they're ready to go they've
got their tongues and larynxes in the
right places and they're excited to try
saying real words to real people at this
point by the time they're a year old or
so they already know all the relevant
speech sounds of their language they've
honed in on those phonemes but just
because they know what they should be
doing doesn't mean they can actually
pull it off like a band with a
hyperactive eight-year-old drummer
speech goes very fast and it requires
some very precise movements to get done
in very exact moments miss your target
by a few millimeters you've just made a
different sound did you forget to open
up a path for air to go out your nose
oops wrong consonant so a lot of the
mistakes that little kids make when
they're learning how to talk come down
to still not having all the practice
they need to get everything right and so
these kinds of mistakes are really
common if you look across all the
different child speech errors over 90%
of the words young kids say show these
kinds of mistakes anytime that you've
talked with the kid who is one or two or
three you've probably noticed them and
the answer you thought they were super
cute too so today we'll look at
substitution errors this is where kids
substitute one phoneme for another and
they tend to fall into a few different
types fortunately most of them are
really transparent as to what changes
let's start with the process called
stopping try to picture this you're
running towards your new girlfriend's ex
who's picked a fight with you and you
want to punch them you go all the way up
to them and you your arm back and
you let your fists fly towards their
face
now what's going to be easier for you
holding back at the very last second
with your knuckles almost raising their
face or slamming into them it's the
slamming right so that's what's going on
with stopping to the sound you want to
make is a fricative and to do that your
tongue or lips have to go almost the
whole way to close the airflow through
your mouth but not point like
if you want to make a sue your tongue
moves up towards the alveolar Ridge
behind your teeth so close that the air
flowing by gets all noisy and strident
but it can't put the whole way to the
ridge and close off the airflow where
you'll make a toe and that's what kids
do they can't control their tongues well
enough to pause just short so instead of
a fricative they make a stop now these
stops will usually get pronounced at the
same place and have the same voicing as
the original sound the kid wanted to
make everything we usually use to
describe where and how consonants are
pronounced will be the same except for
the manner of articulation like singing
will turn to ting or zebra to D bro but
what if there isn't exactly a place to
make a particular stop like we have
labial dental fricatives like food bull
and the interdental fricatives like thon
the but we don't have stops in those
places so what happens then well kids
just go to the closest place otherwise
so the thong thing will also turn to
change since the back of the teeth or
the alveolar Ridge is the closest place
to stop closing your lips entirely is
pretty easy to sew your foes and bows
will turn into bile appeals like I am
turning to pi and you can see the
voiceless full stays voiceless and PO
but the voice vote becomes a voice but
it's pretty close to the same and this
is really common but it's not the only
kind of substitution error just as we
can look at stopping is missing the mark
by closing too much you can also like
your tongue and lips be too open if it
gets to open it turns into a glide
basically just this sign of a vowel and
so this process is known as gliding you
can't get the almost open controls quite
right this is where you get some of the
most stereotypical cute kid errors in
English like rock becoming walk or Lucas
becoming Lucas no for English Roy
usually turns to wool when it undergoes
gliding but law has been found to shift
ooh whoa or yeah like look might become
walk but laugh might become nap instead
and this seems to depend on what that
law is near the upcoming uh makes the
rule go more towards wool since it's
already far back and almost whoosh all
ready but the further from foul like ah
makes the choice of the further front
Glide you're more likely so those are
two different mistakes kids make because
they can't finally control how open or
how close their mouths are but let's say
look at a different kind of substitution
pattern first how about this try
controlling your lips mmm
easy right we're hey try wiggling the
tip of your tongue around that's also
pretty simple but now try moving the
main body of your tongue like all the
way back there that's harder right so
there's a tendency for kids to move
consonants further forward in the mouth
they have more control up there even if
it's not perfect this is known as
fronting where we move the sounds place
of articulation more towards the prompt
so let's look at a few examples of this
take a simple word like go that goes all
the way at the back of your mouth you
make it by raising the body of your
tongue to the soft palate
if you front the sound to the alveolar
Ridge you get dough does still a voice
stop but now you could do with the tip
of your tongue instead way easier but
it's not just with stops say you're a
baby and you want to talk about your toy
chip well you can move that forward to
from being post alveolar - alveolar and
get SEP instead one cool thing about
fronting is that sometimes it meets
babies to make sounds that aren't even
in the language that they're learning
like most dialects of English only have
two Africans the voiceless Joe and the
voice Joe both post alveolar but why
keep things behind the alveolar Ridge if
you can move them up for a word like
chalk you could move it forward and say
talk or for junk you could keep it all
alveolar and said's up English might not
have swords Oh as phonemes like some
other languages - like they're both good
sounds and languages like Albanian and
will sue for example but English
learning kids will still make them our
next error type is kind of similar and
that happens because controlling
everything that you need to make a
particular sound is hard if you want to
make a nasal consonant you have to do
two things around in your vocal tract
you have to close the air flowing out
towards your lips and you have to lower
your soft palate so that the air can
escape and said through your nose you
mean those two ingredients or it's not
nasal but doing both of those things at
once is really tricky and so kids will
sometimes leave out the opening up the
nose part their view of them stay off
and so they make well just normal stop
sounds like buh or done instead this
process is known as D nasalization so
you can see this at work and
like Kim turning to kid but we're pine
turning to pine they stay voiced because
nasals are voiced but they send just
like regular Bund up if you don't know
what word was intended you wouldn't be
able to tell just from what they said so
say go to bed and go to Ben could be the
exact same thing there's also nothing
stopping kids from doing more than one
of these in the same word in fact they
do that a whole lot if you look at a
word like Jam a two-year-old might
instead say dab so fronting the first
consonant and initializing the second
one or take a word like knives
you could see dived with the
initialisation at the beginning and
stopping at the end so when children
make these cute mistakes it doesn't mean
that they don't know what sounds their
language uses often they know they're
wrong as we'll talk about back on the
website it just means that working all
their different mouth bits is really
really hard to sound like a big kid you
just have to go through a whole lot of
training so we've reached the end of the
Ling space for this week if you didn't
just glide on by you learn the kids make
a lot of speech errors because they
can't quite manage their mouths yeah
that some mistakes like stopping and
gliding happen because of a lack of fine
control to keep from being all open or
all closed that fronting comes from
there being more articulatory control at
the front of the vocal tract and that D
nasalization happens because doing to
map things at once is too hard the Ling
space is produced by me moti Lieberman
it's directed by again Amy's Plato and
it's written by both of us our editor
ensures below our production assistant
is stephan hurtubise our music is by
shane turner and our graphics team is
ateliermuse
we're down in the comments below where
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