Hippopotamus is Hard to Say: The Integration of Lexical and Phonological Information

Since then, researchers have resembled children learning phonology—selectively attending to certain stimuli and neglecting others during the process of attaining knowledge. Research studies and clinical observations have centered variably on the phoneme segment, the distinctive feature, and now the phonolgical process. What­ ever the framework for analysis of phonological behavior, one fact cannot be denied, children are learning to say words. The cognitive complexities inherent in in­ tegrating lexical and phonological infor­ mation may render a word like hippopotamus hard to say. Some children, however, are not de­ terred by the phonological complexity of a polysyllabic word if motivated by the desire to express a meaning. Such children have learned how to simplify the word in order to pronounce it. For example, children be­ tween the ages of 19 and 24 months, have been observed to produce hippopotamus with any of the following renditions (Klein, 1981a):