Filler syllables: what is their status in emerging grammar?

Although it has long been observed that some children incorporate unglossable syllables into their early utterances, it has been difficult to integrate these 'fillers' into theories of language acquisition. Because they straddle boundaries between phonology and morphosyntax, and between pragmatics and lexicon, they do not fit neatly into linguists' notions about 'modules' of language. Fillers have been reported in quite an array of languages, and yet they seem to be more common among learners of some languages than others. Even when language is held constant, children seem to vary immensely as to whether they produce fillers at all. With more researchers reporting fillers in more languages, it seems time to (1) review what we now know about fillers; (2) propose a reasonably unified set of criteria for identifying them; and (3) suggest an approach that will promote their further study.

[1]  L. Gerken.  PROSODIC STRUCTURE IN YOUNG CHILDREN'S LANGUAGE PRODUCTION , 1996 .

[2]  Conxita Lleó,et al.  Prosodic constraints on the emergence of grammatical morphemes: Crosslinguistic evidence from Germanic and Romance languages , 1999 .

[3]  L. Bloom.  Language Development: Form and Function in Emerging Grammars , 1970 .

[4]  Barbara Landau,et al.  Function Morphemes in Young Children's Speech Perception and Production , 1990 .

[5]  A. Peters.  LANGUAGE LEARNING STRATEGIES: DOES THE WHOLE EQUAL THE SUM OF THE PARTS? , 1977 .

[6]  Andrew Radford,et al.  Syntactic Theory and the Acquisition of English Syntax: The Nature of Early Child Grammars of English , 1990 .

[7]  W. Dressler,et al.  The Theoretical Relevance of Pre- and Protomorphology in Language Acquisition , 1995 .

[8]  James L. Morgan,et al.  Signal to syntax : bootstrapping from speech to grammar in early acquisition , 1996 .

[9]  R. Brown,et al.  A First Language , 1973 .

[10]  J. Dore,et al.  Transitional phenomena in early language acquisition , 1976, Journal of Child Language.

[11]  Elissa L. Newport,et al.  The Role of Stress and Position in Determining First Words , 1992 .

[12]  L. Gerken,et al.  A metrical template account of children's weak syllable omissions from multisyllabic words , 1994, Journal of Child Language.

[13]  B. MacWhinney.  The CHILDES project: tools for analyzing talk , 1992 .

[14]  M. Braine.  Children's First Word Combinations. , 1976 .

[15]  Marlys A. Macken,et al.  Developmental reorganization of phonology: A hierarchy of basic units of acquisition , 1979 .

[16]  Helen Tager-Flusberg,et al.  Constraints on Language Acquisition : Studies of Atypical Children , 1996 .

[17]  LouAnn Gerken,et al.  Interplay of Function Morphemes and Prosody in Early Language , 1993 .

[18]  E. Veneziano,et al.  From the surface inward: a discontinuous continuity in the emergence of grammatical morphology , 1997 .

[19]  A. McCabe.  Relating events in narrative: a crosslinguistic developmental study , 1996, Journal of Child Language.

[20]  Catharine H. Echols.  A perceptually-based model of children's earliest productions , 1993, Cognition.

[21]  W. Dressler,et al.  On the demarcation of phases in early morphology acquisition in four languages , 1997 .

[22]  Martin D. S. Braine,et al.  The Ontogeny of English Phrase Structure: The First Phase , 1963 .

[23]  Ann M. Peters,et al.  The Units of Language Acquisition , 1983 .

[24]  H. Klein,et al.  Early perceptual strategies for the replication of consonants from polysyllabic lexical models. , 1981, Journal of speech and hearing research.