Cognition and Phonology

Abstract

Children's speech-sound behavior has traditionally been treated as separate from other aspects of communicative behavior. In part this may have been the result of the use of the term articulation to describe this behavior. This term reflects the view that such behavior involves exclusively the acqusition of the motor ability to produce speech sounds and the perceptual ability to discriminate and perceive the acoustic consequences of these productions. However, this view overlooks a major facet of speech-sound behavior. Motor and perceptual abilities are certainly important components, along with higher level representational and organizational components as in other domains of language. The first attempts to delineate these components clearly were the proposals of generative phonologists who posited two basic levels of speech-sound behavior, phonetic and phonological (Chomsky and Halle, 1968). The phonetic level involves some representation of the actual production of speech-sound sequences. Alternately, the phonological level involves some more abstract representation of these sequences along with various types of rules which specify relationships among these representations and transform them into phonetic level realizations. This viewpoint involves a number of parallels with proposals concerning the general nature of other aspects of language as well as with nonlinguistic behaviors involving representation. Our position is that these parallels are indicative of relationships among aspects of speech-sound behavior, other aspects of language behavior, and aspects of other behaviors involving representation. The focus of this paper will be upon evidence for these relationships as well as their clinical and theoretical implications. Piaget (1962) described language as one of several outcomes of the development of the semiotic or symbolic function, the other outcomes being symbolic play, imagery and deferred imitation. More generally, this development involves the attainment of the ability to construct mental representations and perform mental operations. Related, in a somewhat tangential way, is the development of the child in the area of social cognition which early in childhood involves the disappearance of egocentricism. A renewed interest in Piaget's theory has led to a flurry of investigations of the relationships among vari-