Joseph Paul Stemberger

Joseph Paul Stemberger
University of British Columbia | UBC · Department of Linguistics

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135
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Publications

Publications (135)
Article
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The feature [+spread glottis] ([+s.g.]) denotes that a speech sound is produced with a wide glottal aperture with audible voiceless airflow. Icelandic is unusual in the degree to which [+spread glottis] is involved in the phonology: in /h/, pre-aspirated and post-aspirated stops, voiceless fricatives and voiceless sonorants. The ubiquitousness of t...
Article
Full-text available
The present study examines the effects of the frequency of phoneme, syllable, and word units in the Granada corpus of Spanish phonological speech errors. We computed several measures of phoneme and syllable frequency and selected the most sensitive ones, along with word (lexeme) frequency to compare the frequencies of source, target, and error unit...
Article
Full-text available
While consonant acquisition clearly requires mastery of different articulatory configurations (segments), sub-segmental features and suprasegmental contexts influence both order of acquisition and mismatch (error) patterns (Bérubé, Bernhardt, Stemberger & Ciocca, 2020). Constraints-based nonlinear phonology provides a comprehensive framework for in...
Article
Full-text available
This case study presents an English-speaking preschooler with severely protracted phonological development (PPD) before and after two six-week blocks of intervention (36 sessions). Pre-treatment (3;8), he showed very low whole word, singleton consonant, vowel, and word shape matches. He had two major uncommon patterns: (1) higher accuracy for word-...
Article
Full-text available
Although group studies provide necessary information about the range and frequency of phenomena in phonological development, individual profiles (case studies) can be used to describe entire phonological systems in detail. Profiles from different languages can highlight similarities and differences across languages that may be less obvious in group...
Article
This paper addresses the phonology of an Akan-speaking child aged 5;3 with Protracted Phonological Development. His phonological system had many strengths, with most consonants accurate at least some of the time and with many long words, but with weaknesses that lead to a very low Whole Word Match. In addition to some difficulty with consonant and...
Article
This study presents a nonlinear phonological analysis of speech data from a Farsi-speaking child with protracted phonological development (aged 4;8) with very low accuracy on consonants. Results revealed some common phenomena (fricatives produced as stops; dorsals and non-anterior coronals produced as anterior coronals) and some uncommon phenomena...
Article
Full-text available
This paper addresses the phonology of a Swedish girl, aged 3 years 10 months, with extensive phonological difficulties that include an unusual phonological pattern. She had relatively well-developed phonological building blocks in terms of features, stress pattern and word length (number of syllables), but had extensive difficulties regarding sylla...
Article
This paper addresses how input variability in the adult phonological system is mastered in the output of young children in Akan, a Kwa language spoken in Ghana, involving variability between labio-palatalized consonants and front rounded vowels. The high-frequency variant involves a complex consonant which is expected to be mastered late, while the...
Article
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Purpose Although Akan is one of the most widely spoken indigenous languages in Ghana, very little is known about children’s phonological development. This paper investigates the development of consonants in Akan among typically developing children aged 3–5 years. Method A list of 103 Akan words was compiled, sampling the full range of prosodic str...
Chapter
This book focuses exclusively on child bilinguals or children exposed to a second language in various learning contexts. Through the presentation of research on how children learn the sound systems or lexicon in two languages and via different routes, the book aims to paint a comprehensive picture of child bilingualism and second language learning....
Article
Purpose To provide preliminary reference data for singleton consonant development in children with typical development (TD) versus protracted phonological development (PPD) for Manitoba Canadian French, a language with an uncommon stress pattern (“iambic” or “right-headed”). Following a nonlinear perspective, singleton consonants were examined both...
Article
Full-text available
Previous research on Bulgarian consonant acquisition reports earlier acquisition of stops, nasals and glides than fricatives, affricates and liquids. The current study expands the investigation of Bulgarian consonant acquisition. The primary objective was to identify characteristics of protracted versus typical phonological development (PPD versus...
Article
The past few decades have seen rapid changes in speech-language pathology in terms of technology, information on speech production and perception, and increasing levels of multilingualism in communities. This tutorial provides an overview of phonetic transcription for the modern world, both for work with clients, and for research and training. The...
Chapter
Is tandem a viable technique for improving fluency? Participants often perceive improvement, but prior research is predominantly based on online exchanges and self-evaluation. Language production of diverse speakers (English, Mandarin, etc.) learning French/Japanese was measured within a 10-week, face-to-face tandem programme. The purpose was to ex...
Article
This paper describes word-initial (WI) rhotic cluster development in Slovenian 4-year-olds. Data for /l/ and WI singleton /r/ serve as comparisons. Participants were 19 children with typical development (TD) and 13 with more protracted phonological development (PPD). A single-word list included 15 WI /r/-clusters, 9 /l/-clusters and 3 singleton /r/...
Article
The current paper describes acquisition of word-initial (WI) trilled /r/ in clusters and as a singleton in 60 Bulgarian 3-5-year-olds with typically developing (TD) versus protracted phonological development (PPD). A native speaker audio-recorded and transcribed single-word responses to a picture-naming task (110 words) that included eight words wi...
Article
Full-text available
The current issue examined acquisition of challenging segments in complex contexts: Taps/trills in word-initial clusters, plus related targets (/l/-clusters and singleton rhotics and /l/). Data were from preschool children with typical versus protracted phonological development (PPD) in Iceland, Sweden (Germanic), Portugal, Spain/Chile (Romance), B...
Article
The papers in this crosslinguistic issue address children’s acquisition of word-initial rhotic clusters in languages with taps/trills, that is, the acquisition of challenging segments in complex environments. Several papers also include comparisons with singleton rhotics and/or /l/ as a singleton or in clusters. The studies are part of a larger inv...
Chapter
After a long hiatus, MacKay (1970) brought attention back to these data, using them to argue that speakers actively use morphological rules to construct inflected forms, and that misapplication of those rules underlies the errors in (1). MacKay's work set the pattern for more recent work in several ways. First, most of it has focused on errors, rat...
Article
Full-text available
An international study is investigating phonological development in 12 languages: Romance (Canadian French, Granada, Mexican and Chilean Spanish, and European Portuguese); Germanic (German, English, Swedish, and Icelandic); Semitic (Kuwaiti Arabic); Asian (Japanese, Mandarin); South Slavic (Bulgarian, Slovene). Additional phonological assessment ma...
Article
Background: Arabic, a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic variety, has a rich consonant inventory. Previous studies on Arabic phonological acquisition have focused primarily on dialects in Jordan and Egypt. Because Arabic varies considerably across regions, information is also needed for other dialects. Aims: To determine acquisition benchmarks...
Article
Information and assessment tools concerning Tagalog phonological development are minimally available. The current study thus sets out to develop elicitation and analysis tools for Tagalog. A picture elicitation task was designed with a warm-up, screener and two extension lists, one with more complex and one with simpler words. A nonlinear phonologi...
Technical Report
Prueba de evaluación fonológica en Español. Screening.
Article
Currently, there is no theoretically justified, evidence-based metric for evaluating segmental and prosodic components of multisyllabic words (MSWs). A pilot study evaluated a MSW metric embedded in non-linear phonological- and language-processing frameworks. Six MSWs were analyzed in 10 Canadian English-speaking 5-year-olds with typically developi...
Article
Few studies have directly compared fricative development across languages. The current study examined voiceless fricative production in Icelandic- versus English-speaking preschoolers with protracted phonological development (PPD). Expected were: a low fricative match (with age effect), highest match levels for /f/ and non-word-initial fricatives,...
Poster
The acquisition of word-initial clusters compared to that of singleton trill in the speech of children with typical development (TD) and those with protracted phonological development (PPD). A total of 191 monolingual children with TD aged between 3–6 and 15 children with PPD (M = 6;7) participated in the present study. Picture naming task was used...
Article
Background: Research on children's word structure development is limited. Yet, phonological intervention aims to accelerate the acquisition of both speech-sounds and word structure, such as word length, stress or shapes in CV sequences. Until normative studies and meta-analyses provide in-depth information on this topic, smaller investigations can...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Povzetek Cilj prispevka je opisati in analizirati fonološke procese, še posebej epentezo, stopnjo uporabe glede na obliko zlogovne strukture glede na mesto in način artikulacije, pri 54 slovensko govorečih otrocih, starih 3 - 7 let. Iz rezultatov je razvidno, da soglasniška epenteza med 4;0 in 5;0 letom narašča, od 5;0 do 6;6 pa postopoma upada....
Chapter
Few studies have directly compared fricative development across languages. The current study examined voiceless fricative production in Icelandic-versus English-speaking preschoolers with protracted phono-logical development (PPD). Expected were: a low fricative match (with age effect), highest match levels for /f/ and non-word-initial fricatives,...
Article
Full-text available
Models of language learning and processing differ in their level of emphasis on the storage of individual meaningful units versus combinations of meaningful units. While there is evidence for the storage of larger stretches of speech, a separate issue is how much such stored forms contribute to processing, as compared to morphologically simpler for...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
egu dialektologih, logopedih in surdopedagogih ter ne nazadnje tudi pri vseh osebah, ki se ukvarjajo z aplikacijami oz. jezikovnimi tehnologijami. Abstract Phonetic transcription with symbols and diacritics from IPA and extIPA chart (2005) is a basic skill for researchers who study, analyse, and describe speech. Transcription allows reading, compar...
Article
Regular plural nouns rarely appear as the first member of a compound noun in English under any circumstances, while irregular plurals are more likely under certain conditions. One explanation holds that this is a consequence of the fundamentally different ways in which regular and irregular plurals are stored and processed, while an alternative exp...
Article
Full-text available
Lexical access in language production shows effects of permanent statistical properties of the lexicon, but also of temporary phonological influences of words produced in the same sentence. In this study of present-tense verbs in Slovene, conjoining an irregular and a regular form, where both verbs have the same base-final consonant, leads to a dra...
Article
Full-text available
Clinicians have had limited resources for conducting phonological evaluations of Canadian Francophone children and, to this day, there are no standardized tests of French-Canadian phonology (Brosseau-Lapré, Rvachew, Arcand, & Leroux, 2011). Recently, preliminary normative data were collected with a French screening tool in Québec, with results indi...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Introduction: Children’s first words do not sound like those which are spoken by adults and they are characterized by systematic sound substitutions, deletions, omission, additions, and distortions and other phonological processes as fronting, stopping and devoicing. Children’s first or earliest words are approximations of the target forms of ad...
Article
SmithNeil, Acquiring phonology: A cross-generational case-study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. xvii+265. - Volume 48 Issue 1 - JOSEPH PAUL STEMBERGER
Article
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It is a position statement about Speech Assessment for Multilingual Children Who Do Not Speak the Same Language(s) as the Speech-Language Pathologist. It was put together by The International Expert Panel on Multilingual Children's Speech.
Article
Full-text available
A crosslinguistic study is underway concerning children's protracted phonological development (i.e. speech sound disorders). The current article reports pilot Spanish data for this study from two 4-year-old boys with protracted phonological development. The purposes of the pilot study were to: (1) develop and evaluate a word list for elicitation th...
Article
Full-text available
Although phonological intervention can be effective in the short-term (Law, Garrett Nye, 2009), long-term normalization has been reported for only 20-50% of children (e.g., Rvachew, Chang & Evans, 2007). Furthermore, even in the short-term, not all children progress as quickly as might be hoped. Thus, it is important to continue to develop alternat...
Chapter
Full-text available
Sinopsis: Este trabajo presenta los lineamientos y avances de una investigación sobre el desarrollo fonológico del zapoteco del Valle en el pueblo de San Lucas Quiaviní, Oaxaca. Desde 2004 a la fecha, se ha realizado un seguimiento semi-longitudinal y seccional de más de 49 niños monolingües, de edades entre 1 y 9 años. La lengua adulta presenta un...
Article
This paper investigates the effect of the repetition of phonological elements on accuracy in spontaneous language production. Using a corpus of naturalistic speech errors, it is shown that repetition of a whole segment doubles the error rate on the second token (a perseveratory effect), for onset consonants, vowels, and coda consonants; the effect...
Article
Full-text available
This paper describes an intervention plan for a child with a resistant phonological impairment. The plan first addresses factors and intervention strategies associated with the phonological impairment: a history of otitis media, attention deficit, learning difficulties, language delay, oral-motor dysfunction and environmental factors. A phonologica...
Chapter
IntroductionPhonological Theories over TimeClinical Application of Constraints-Based Nonlinear Phonological TheoriesStudies of Phonological Intervention for Children Applying Nonlinear Phonological TheoryTalking Back to TheoryClinical Application: Present and FutureReferences
Article
This paper provides an overview of constraint-based nonlinear phonological theories (Bernhardt & Stemberger, 1998) in clinical application to German. Tenets of the theories are briefly introduced, and then illustrated with longitudinal data from a 3-year-old German-speaking child with variable and protracted phonological development. The child's co...
Article
Overtensing (the use of an inflected form in place of a nonfinite form, e.g. ∗didn’t broke for target didn’t break) is common in early syntax. In a ChiLDES-based study of 36 children acquiring English, I examine the effects of phonological and lexical factors. For irregulars, errors are more common with verbs of low frequency and when phonological...
Article
Full-text available
The present study examines the frequency of syllable, word, and phoneme units in a corpus of 1477 Spanish phonological speech errors. Phoneme targets were of equivalent frequency to matched controls, whereas phoneme sources and error phonemes were lower in frequency than chance and than target phonemes (the David effect). Error, target, and source...
Chapter
Some models of language production use speech errors (malfunctions of language processing) as evidence for the organization of the language system.
Article
Models of speech production differ on whether phonological neighbourhoods should affect processing, and on whether effects should be facilitatory or inhibitory. Inhibitory effects of large neighbourhoods have been argued to underlie apparent anti-frequency effects, whereby high-frequency default features are more prone to mispronunciation errors th...
Article
It has been shown that the processing of irregular past-tense forms is affected by phonological factors that are inherent in the relationship of the past-tense forms to other words in the lexicon (rhyming families of irregulars) or to their base forms (vowel dominance effects). This paper addresses more ephemeral phonological effects. In a sentence...
Article
In morphological processing in adult speech, irregular forms are subject to several types of errors, including overregularisation (e.g., falled for correct “fell”) and overtensing (e.g., didn’t fell for correct “didn’t fall”). In two experiments using the morphonaming task, it was found that the probability of these errors is affected by a phonolog...
Article
Regularly inflected forms often behave differently in language production than irregular forms. These differences are often used to argue that irregular forms are listed in the lexicon but regular forms are produced by rule. Using an experimental speech production task with adults, it is shown that overtensing errors, where a tensed verb is used in...
Article
Intervocalic consonants have received far less attention in research on first language acquisition than consonants at the edges of words. Theories have predicted that intervocalic consonants may show special properties because they are in a special position in syllable structure (constituting both an onset, or syllable-initial consonant, and a coda...
Article
Acquisition of intervocalic consonants has been insufficiently studied, both in terms of subject numbers, and in terms of differentiating syllabification patterns from those involving vowel feature assimilation. The question has remained: are English intervocalic consonants syllable-initial (onsets), syllable-final (codas) or ambisyllabic? This stu...
Article
Intervocalic consonants have received far less attention in research on first language acquisition than consonants at the edges of words. Theories have predicted that intervocalic consonants may show special properties because they are in a special position in syllable structure (constituting both an onset, or syllable-initial consonant, and a coda...
Article
The German facts are consistent with the hypothesis that the default is the most frequent allomorph. Plural -s is the least frequent allomorph and does not act as a default. There is another way to measure the frequency of perfects in which no single -n allomorph is as frequent as -t. Lexical versus computational components do not correlate with re...
Article
Introduction. Worldviews for Phonology. Phonological Representations and Processes. Constraints. Segmental Development. Prosodic Development. Sequences of Elements. Theory and Application: Not Just for the Clinician. Acquisition of Adult Alternations. Discussion and Conclusions. Appendix A: International Phonetic Association (1989) Symbols Used in...
Article
When children produce regularizations like comed, not all verbs are equally likely to be regularized. Several variables (e.g. lexical frequency) have been shown to be relevant, but not all the variability between verbs is understood. It is argued here that one predictor is which vowels are present in the base form vs. the past tense form. Using a n...
Article
Glottal consonants (/h/ and /?/) often have a special status that has led to the hypothesis that they are underspecified for both consonant and vowel place of articulation features. There is an alternative acoustically based explanation for the special status that, while workable, is valued less highly in linguistic theory. This alternative hypothe...
Article
Phonological underspecification for English vowels is addressed using data from language production. Patterns in speech errors induced by means of the experimental SLIPS procedure argue for radical underspecification; the underspecified vowel place features are [-high], [-low], [-back], and [-round] (as in /epsilon/). Similarity effects in naturall...
Article
The systematic mispronunciations of young children often resemble phonological rules, and there is a temptation to treat the data as identical to adult phonological data. However, performance factors are often evident in the child's speech. Constraints in phonological theory are "hard" (all-or-nothing), but constraints in performance are often "sof...
Chapter
Empirical disciplines have long distinguished between two types of evidence bearing on behavior: experimental evidence and naturalistic evidence. In behavioral biology, both types of evidence are routinely used. It is generally recognized that naturalistic evidence cannot be dispensed with, because there is no way to guarantee natural behavior in a...
Chapter
Coronals often take part in phonological patterns that are different from those of other places of articulation. In many languages, coronals assimilate to other places of articulation even though velars and labials do not assimilate. Such behavior has been used to argue that coronals are not specified for place of articulation in underlying forms....
Article
Phonological underspecification plays an important role in phonological theory. Some features are left blank in underlying representations. If they are relevant to the pronunciation of a segment, they are filled in at some point in the derivation; otherwise, they are left blank permanently. When underspecification was reintroduced to phonological t...
Article
Speech errors are explored using an experimental task. It is shown that there are asymmetries between certain pairs of consonants: alveolar consonants are more often replaced by consonants of other places of articulation than vice versa; oral stops are more often replaced by consonants of other manners of articulation than vice versa; and voiceless...
Article
Errors in natural speech that crucially involve the shape of the target word, i.e. interact in some way with the number of consonants and vowels in the word and their relative positioning, are examined in detail. It is shown that context highly constrains the rate of such errors. The data implicate a distinction between a segment level that encodes...
Article
There has been very little attention paid to nonsystemic errors in child language that closely resemble the speech errors made by adults. I have collected 576 such errors in the course of doing diary studies on my two children. Analyses reveal strong similarities with adult errors, suggesting that the language production system is set up in an adul...
Article
Most processes in child phonology have as their domain a single word or a smaller chunk of phonological material. Processes that involve the interaction of two or more words have never been examined. In a diary study of the speech of one child acquiring English, there were eight between-word processes. All were optional and occurred in fairly restr...

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