Consonantal interaction in the speech of Iraqi children with high-functioning autism : evidence from generative phonology

Abstract EN

This work offers a generative analysis of consonantal replacement and interaction elicited in the speech of pre-school Iraqi children with high functioning autism.

It is mainly involved to identify the speech impairment at the segmental level as performed by 3 Iraqi autistic children aging 7,8, 9 years, respectively.

The treatment of data via the conversional generative rules discloses that the tendency of conversion channels into obstruents (with a percentage average of 88.65%) as compared to sonorants (with a percentage average of 40.86%).The analysis by dint of the candidate evaluation scheme (in the framework of Optimality Theory) showed a great preference towards penalizing the lowest faithfulness constraints, thus these constraints win out over markedness constraints.

This type of precedence leads to the generation of the universally unmarked outputs, giving the chance to other potential (alternative) outputs to survive.

The violation of the faithfulness constraints scores its highest rating (47.61%) for IDENT-manner constraint, followed by IDENT-place and non-emphatic faithfulness constraints with an equal rating (19.4%), followed by the binary IDENT-place+ manner faithfulness constraint (9.52%).

The markedness constraint ( stop) is posited at the bottom of the violation index with the rating (4.76%).