LONG-DISTANCE PLACE ASSIMILATION WITH AN INTERACTING ERROR PATTERN INPHONOLOGICAL ACQUISITION

Two commonly occurring and independent error patterns in children's ea rly speech are examined to determine how and to what extent they might interact. One error pattern replaces velar consonants with coronals, and the other replaces a coronal with a consonant that agrees in place of articulation with some other consonant elsewhere in the word. A ra nge of interactions is observed within and across children with regard to whether the product of one error pattern can serve as the target o f the other. The different interactions motivate different claims abou t the nature and substance of children's underlying representations, w hich in some cases may differ from those of the ambient system. An ext ension to underspecification theory is advanced which allows underlyin g representations to be radically underspecified and in certain cases also to be specified for a default feature.