ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to justify this claim by applying a developing theory of articulatory phonology to a small set of data drawn from the utterances of a 2-year-old child. The gestures for a given utterance are organised into a larger co-ordinated structure, represented by a gestural score. Waterson goes on to group the child's forms into "structures" or "schemata", corresponding to the adult "prosodic" patterns in which features are distributed over a word. The transcriptions will be given in square brackets, following the convention for adult phonetic segments. The chapter argues that, despite the utility of the feature as a descriptive and classificatory element in phonetic theory, it cannot guide a child into speech. The gestures for a given utterance are organised into a larger co-ordinated structure, represented by a gestural score. The score specifies the values of the dynamic parameters for each gesture and the period over which the gesture is active.
