Consonant Harmony in aphasia and phonological acquisition: does the grammar of

Persons with Aphasia resemble children’s grammar(s)?

Katerina Iliopoulou & Ioanna Kappa
University of Crete
Consonant Harmony (CH), the process of assimilation among non-adjacent consonantal
segments, is a process not typologically common in adult systems, where it targets peripheral
features (Hansson, 2010; i.a.), but a common (feature-level) segmental process in the early
stages of (a)typical phonological development in many languages, including Greek (e.g. Kappa
et al., 2022; i.a.). The most common type of CH in child language involves the primary PLACE
OF ARTICULATION (PoA) (Pater, 1997; i.a.). Few studies have addressed CH in aphasia to this
day (Béland & Favreau (1991) for French; Kohn et al. (1995) for English). The phonology –
including CH– of Greek-speaking Persons with Aphasia (PWA) remains a rather unexplored
field in Greek phonology. For the purposes of this study, we rely:
(i) on our corpus of longitudinal developmental data from the spontaneous typical speech of
4 (male) children (ages: 2-2;06.15, years; months. days), who are acquiring Greek as L1.
(ii) on the Corpus of Greek Aphasic Speech (Goutsos et al., 2011), from where we have drawn
data from 10 Greek-speaking PWA, who are able to produce all phonemes/allophones.
In both the children’s developmental data and the data from PWA, we have attested the
following homogenous CH patterns (I, II), where CH is restricted to two successive head
onsets (Onset-Onset), including the onset of the stressed syllable, that have:
I. Similar feature(s), namely the same MANNER OF ARTICULATION (MoA):
CH predominantly targets LABIAL and DORSAL consonants, that agree to the unmarked
CORONAL PoA of a strictly following onset (in italics), e.g.
(1) ˈcita➝ˈtita (child: #1, #2, #6), (2) ma.na➝ˈna.na (PWA #11), (3) vojˈθiso➝ ðojˈθiso
(PWA #38), following the harmonic PoA hierarchy (Prince & Smolensky, 1993),
i. e. CORONAL≻DORSAL (1), CORONAL≻LABIAL (2, 3).
MoA and laryngeal features are realized faithfully.
II. Dissimilar feature(s) in MoA and PoA, where two different sub-patterns emerge:
a) Agreement to the unmarked PoA, as above in (I):
(4) ˈpano ➝ˈtano (child: #1, #2), (5) sfuˈgaɾi ➝ fuˈdali (child: #2, #6),
(6) xaɾˈti ➝ saˈti (child: #2, #4), (7) e.ɟe.fa.li.ˈko ➝ e.ɟe.fa.li.ˈto (PWA #33)
b) Both PoA and MoA agreement to the consonant with the unmarked PoA,
e. g. CORONAL≻LABIAL: (8) ˈfeta➝ ˈteta (child: #2), (9) ˈpiso➝ˈðiso (PWA #13).
We illustrate the grammars active in patterns (I) and (II), couching our analysis in Span
Theory (McCarthy, 2004). Our findings suggest that, in the systems of the above children and
PWA, CH applies within harmonic spans headed by a CORONAL onset consonant, which is
faithful to the target (input), and determines the realization of the PoA feature of the other span
(onset) segment; CH is guided by agreement to the unmarked CORONAL PoA of the span head.
We claim that CH in language acquisition and aphasia is heterogeneously motivated,
resulting from different requirements in the relevant grammars. CH in these children’s data is
viewed as a neutralization process, which minimizes the contrasts mainly in primary PoA
within the (output) PWd, due to the children’s immature phonological system (e. g. Fikkert &
Levelt, 2008) which is being reorganized, still retaining its demand for unmarkedness over
faithfulness to the input. However, CH in our aphasic data is an infrequent process, viewed as
a compensatory mechanism (Kohn et al., 1995), resulting from a phonological access deficit,
rather than from system reorganization: at times, while PWA have access to the segmental
quantity of the target word, some distinctive features (PoA and/or MoA) cannot be completely
retrieved for some phonemes, due to the damaged retrieval of PWA. In order for these
phonemes to be realized, they agree to an unmarked for PoA adjacent (onset) consonant on the
segmental (consonantal) tier, resembling the dominant CORONAL harmony pattern attested in
the system of the children in this study, albeit heterogeneously motivated.
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