CHILD LANGUAGE APHASIA AND PHONOLOGICAL UNIVERSALS

Beginning with a discussion of previous theories of child language, Jakobson clarifies the need for and context of his theory. The premise of his approach is that phonemes achieve significance only in their contrastive relationships. Using this idea, he explains specifically many of the speech deformities (or, non-formities) typical of children, e.g., substitution of "y" for "l". Jakobson shows that consonant and vowel differentiation patterns are essentially the same for learners of all human languages. He also shows that the production of some sounds presupposes the production of other sounds. The hierarchy of contrastive relationships between phonemes is clarified with his discussion of aphasia, speech formation in reverse, and pronunciation of foreign languages. E.g., "r" and "l" are difficult for those whose first and primary language is Japanese because Japanese does not use the latter liquid; similarly, Russian speakers have difficulties with Serbo-Croatian accents, and English speakers with the German "ch".