The contrastive hierarchy in phonology 2009 Dresher.pdf - CUNY ...

fundamental perceptual-cognitive building blocks rather than by-
products of language acquisition. [emphasis added]
What Kuhl et al. call ‘phonetic prototypes’ are not equivalent to
phonemes; they are phones, phonetic variants of phonemes. Infants become
sensitive to the phonetic range and distribution of the sounds of their language,
so they can tell, for example, that the pronunciation of a Swedish [i] inserted into
an English utterance is somehow anomalous. But this is not the same as learning
which phones cluster together to form phonemes.
Nevertheless, the fact that infants are able to make fine phonetic
discriminations has sometimes been taken as evidence that children’s initial
phonological representations are accurate and essentially adult-like (cf. Hale and
Reiss 1998). If that is correct, then it must be the case that the appearance that
learners are gradually acquiring phonological contrasts is not a reflection of their
linguistic competence, but only of production. This theory is bolstered by
anecdotes that children are aware of phonemic contrasts that they are unable to
produce themselves; a famous example is Neil Smith’s son Amahl protesting
when his father said sip instead of ship, even though Amahl himself pronounced
both as sip (Smith 1973).
If learners’ phonological representations were adult-like from the
beginning, we would no longer have evidence that the system of contrasts is
learned gradually, nor would we have evidence for a contrastive hierarchy in
acquisition. In fact, we would not even have evidence that contrast is important
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