Prosody and melody in vowel disorder

The paper explores the syllabic and segmental dimensions of phonological vo wel disorder. The independence of the two dimensions is illustrated by the case study of an English-speaking child presenting with an impairment which can be shown to have a specifically syllabic basis. His production of adul t long vowels displays three main patterns of deviance - shortening, bisyll abification and the hardening of a target off-glide to a stop. Viewed phone mically, these patterns appear as unconnected substitutions and distortions . Viewed syllabically, however, they can be traced to a single underlying d eficit, namely a failure to secure the complex nuclear structure necessary for the coding of vowel length contrasts.