Markedness and implicational relationships in phonological development: A cross-linguistic investigation.
Erica Watts, Yvan Rose
PMID 33342295WHAT IT FOUND
In a longitudinal analysis of six children, phonological rules linking directly comparable sounds held true, but rules linking unrelated units were contradicted or unverifiable.
Clinicians should not assume acquiring one complex sound guarantees acquisition of unrelated sounds.
Key findings
01Only implicational relationships between directly comparable units or phonetic dimensions were validated, while others were contradicted or could not be verified.
02Relationships involving formally similar units were the most clearly supported by the cross-linguistic data.
03Specific universalist proposals linking unrelated categories, such as clusters implying affricates, were contradicted by individual learner data.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample size is very small (six children), limiting the generalizability of the findings to the broader population. The analysis relied on phonetic transcription without acoustic verification, which may have missed subtle phonetic details. Some relationships could not be tested because the children did not acquire the relevant sounds within the recorded time periods. The study focused on specific theoretical proposals (Gierut 2007) and may not cover all potential implicational relationships.
Declared interests
The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health (N.I.H.) and non-U.S. government grants. No commercial conflicts of interest are reported in the provided text.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the failure of specific universal rules as evidence that the complexity approach is ineffective overall. The study supports markedness relationships between comparable units (e.g., clusters vs. singletons) but rejects those between unrelated units (e.g., clusters vs. affricates). Target selection should still consider structural complexity, but clinicians should not expect generalization across disparate phonological categories based solely on markedness.