Phonological Processes in A 18-Months Bilingual Toddler

The toddler’s first words were unintelligible speech by adult. This study was conducted to investigate the language development undergone by a 18-months bilingual toddler. The study of language development had two perspectives in terms of clinical and linguistic perspective. This study was a linguistic perspective to find out the language development processes especially in phonological processes undergone by a 18-months bilingual toddler. This study employed descriptive case study as the method with observation and video recording as the data collection. The participant of this study was a 18months Javanesse-Indonesian toddler. The data were collected for 30 days. The data were categorized and analyzed based on Ingram's theory (1976). The result revealed that there were three categories of phonological processes undergone by 18-months Javanesse-Indonesian toddler such as substitution, assimilatory, and syllable structure processes. The syllable structure processes with initial consonant deletion is the most dominant types of phonological processes. The results are expected to enrich the study of language development especially in a 18-months Javanesse-Indonesian toddler in which the information will benefit for the practicing clinicians.


Introduction
Language is considered as one of communication tools by human beings. Human beings especially adults communicate with world by means of a language that can be understood by others. However, children communicate by means of language that is sometimes hard to be understood by adults. Therefore, the process of language development in human beings especially in earlier period of children is interesting. Ingram (1989) also reported that when a child begins to expand inventory of speech sounds. They would experience phonological processes that lead in incorrect productions. These processes predominate in language development until around the ages of 4. The stages can be categorized into (1) Prelinguistic vocalization and perception (birth to 1;0); (2) Phonology of the first 50 words (1;0-1;6); and (3) Phonology of single morphemes (1;6-4;0).
There are two major perspectives in learning the language development, medical and linguistic perspective. The medical perspective is a longer history of perspective used by speech-language pathologist to explain and to identify the cause of speech impairments of organic problems such as cleft palate. This perspective will benefit speech-language pathologist to do the possibility of medical intervention. The other perspective is linguistic perspective. This perspective is also crucial in language development by providing the theories about the understanding of phonological developments and impairments in children. Both these perspectives are complement one another because medical perspective will deal with the integrity of neuroanatomical system; and the linguistic perspective will provide description of language system development occurred in children (Baker, Croot, McLeod, & Paul, 2001).
This study focuses on the linguistic perspective of language development. The study is limited on the phonological processes in a child. Bankson & Bernthal (1990, as cited in Bernthal, Bankson, & Flipsen, 2016 defined the phonological processes as a simplification of a sound class in which targeted sounds are systematically deleted or substituted. The phonological processes are chosen because in earlier period of producing sounds, a child will produce unintelligible speech by simplification of the sounds. There are some previous studies about the phonological processes; and the common studies are in children above 3 years old. James, van Doorn, McLeod, & Esterman (2008) found that monolingual children speaking Australian English between 3 -7 years mostly used consonant deletion; and there is also relationship between the frequency of deletion and the number of syllables in words. James, Ferguson, & Butcher (2016) also found there are 16 phonological processes undergone by Australian English between 3 -7 years. Cleland et al., (2017) conducted a study about the error in persistent velar fronting occurred in children at ages of 6 -10 years. Fabiano-Smith & Cuzner (2018) investigated the initial consonant deletion in bilingual children at average ages of 4 years; and revealed that complexity of syllable type does not motivate initial consonant deletion. However, there is still limited study in children under 3 years old. Claessen et al., (2017) state it is possible to identify 2 years old children because they have a relatively stable phonological system. The example of the study under 2 years old is conducted by Adnyani & Pastika (2016) towards an Indonesia-German child between the ages of 12 -20 months.
Therefore, this study is conducted in a child under 3 years old. In addition, there have been limited studies concerned on the language development especially in phonological processes encountered by Javanese-Indonesian toddler at ages of 18 months. This study is conducted to find out what types of phonological processes occurred in a 18-months of Javanese-Indonesia toddler. The results of the study, theoretically, are expected to enrich the language development especially in phonological processes with ages of 18-months Javanese-Indonesian toddler. This information will benefit for practicing clinicians. In addition, practically, by knowing the types of phonological processes, it would help parents to understand the speaking of their children better.

Language Development
Lauwers & Swisher (2011) states that as soon as babies are born; they will cry. They may cry to indicate hunger, pain, or reaction to their environments. Crying is considered as means of communication even though this language is not easily understood (Liu, Li, Wu, & Zhou, 2019). Although, babies can not speak words like an adult; they can communicate and ready to respond to human voice (Ashford et al., 2018). After that moments, infants will learn to communicate. They communicate with worlds by means of gesturing their hands, bodies, face, eyes, approaching and touching other, making noise and vocalizing (Liszkowski, 2014). Before they speak words, they will explore their vocal apparatus communicatively in prelinguistics vocalization. They will begin to produce more primitive sounds which are called protophones as the precursors to speech rather than targeting vowels, consonants, words, or phrases (Jhang & Oller, 2017). The sounds produced are quite different from the phonemes of speech relative to adults because their vocal tracts are different in shapes and size; and they are also unable to control their lounge, lips, and jaw in the same manner as adults (Stark, 1978).
The first sounds produced by infants are soft vowel sounds like dove cooing (Levine & Munsch, 2016). They begin to coo or make sounds such as "Ahhhh" or "Ohhhh" (Ashford et al., 2018). And between 6 and 8 months, infants begin to babble a single syllable repeated such as, bababa-mamama, mememe-dede, baba-dadada (Clark, 2009). At this point, parents are very excited because they considered "dada" refers to "daddy"; and "mama" refers to "mommy" (Levine & Munsch, 2016). Babbling sometimes leads to infant's first words; and they learn to understand words between 9 and 15 months of age when infants develop a capacity for interpreting others' goals and intentions (Bergelson & Swingley, 2012).

Phonological Processes
Ingram (1976) categorizes phonological processes into three, substitution, assimilatory, and syllable structure processes. The first is substitution processes. These processes result in the replacement of one segment by another. There are five commons of substitution processes undergone by children such as (1) stopping, (2) fronting, (3) gliding, (4) vocalization, and (5) vowel neutralization. The second is assimilatory processes. These processes are tendencies to assimilate one segment in another words. There are three common assimilatory processes in children such as (1) voicing, (2) consonant harmony, and (3) progressive vowel assimilation. The third is syllable structure processes. These processes are tendencies by children to simplify syllable structure. There are four basic syllable structure processes in children such as (1) cluster reduction, (2) deletion of final consonant, (3) deletion of weak syllable, and (4) reduplication.

Methodology
This study employed descriptive case study as the method. The case study is chosen because the focus of this study is to understand the naturalistic setting or certain phenomena of person in everyday life.

Participant
The participant of this study is the researcher's nephew. His name is Rafanda with Rafa as his nickname. He is a toddler with 18 months of ages. He is a normal toddler without physical disability. He was born in bilingual family. His parents native to Javanese and Indonesian language. They usually communicate with both language to his son interchangeably. Therefore, sometimes Rafanda speaks in Javanese or Indonesian language.

Instruments
The data are collected by means of video recorder and observation. However, there are challenges when collecting the data. At this age, the vocabulary of the participant is still limited; and he often produces words that are hardly to be understood by the researcher or people around. He also sometimes prefers to use gesture when communicating or asking something rather than speaking the vocabulary. Therefore, when collecting the data, it is helped by his babysitter. The babysitter will invite the participant to communicate such as by asking "what is the color of his clothe?" etc. This conversation is recorded by video recorder. The data are collected for 30 days.

Data Analysis
There are several steps in analyzing the data. First the video will be transcribed. Second, the sounds that are unclear such as toddler's babbling will be eliminated. And third, the data will be analyzed and categorized based on the phonological processes proposed by Ingram (1976).

Result and Discussion
The result reveals that when Rafanda, a 18-months Javanese-Indonesian toddler, is speaking; there is a simplification of his vocabulary. The simplification can be categorized into three categories, substitution, assimilatory, and syllable structure processes based on Ingram's theory (1976). These processes are explained bellow.

Substitution Processes
The first process is substitution processes. These processes occur when there is a substitution of one segment to another segment. The substitution processes undergone by Rafanda are two types, stopping and fronting. These processes are the common pattern of phonological processes occurred in children's speech (Ingram, 1976). These innate processes occur as the representation of constraints in which a child will produce the simplest pronunciation patterns in the early stages of phonological development by modifying or suppressing in order to learn more advanced form or adult realization of the sound in the process of mastering spoken language (Bowen, 2015).

Stopping Processes
The first process is stopping process. This process is the common pattern and becomes more established patterns in children's speech. This process affects the fricative group of sounds, although occasionally will affect the resonant group of sounds (Ingram, 1976). Based on the result, the stopping processes only affect the fricative sounds undergone by Rafanda, as can be seen in Table 1. The two words above indicate that Rafanda tends to substitute the voiced palatal plosive /c/ for the fricatives such as voiceless alveolar fricative /s/ and voiceless labiodental fricative /f/. These substitution processes are systemic and applied in the same context each time that sound occurs. These processes are in line with the Jakobson's law and prediction (1941( , as cited in Ingram, 1989. He proposed a law of irreversible solidarity that the existence of fricatives implies the existence of stops; and a predication in language acquisition that stops are acquired before fricatives. However, these processes will be systematically eliminated at predictable age in a standard development progression. Grunwell (1987, as cited in Alexander, Matthews, & Murphy, 2015) states that the substitution of the voiced palatal plosive /c/ for the fricatives such as voiceless alveolar fricative /s/ and voiceless labiodental fricative /f/ are gone by approximately at ages of 3 years.

Fronting Processes
The second process of substitution processes is fronting process. This process actually involves two processes, fronting of palatal and fronting of velar which are replaced with alveolar ones (Ingram, 1976). However, there is only fronting of velar found in Rafanda's speech. In addition Grunwell (1987, as cited in Alexander, Matthews, & Murphy, 2015) states that velar fronting occurs when a velar stop is replaced by an alveolar stop such as /k/ in 'kiss' is replaced by /t/; /ɡ/ in 'give' is replaced by /d/; and /ŋ/ in 'wing' is replaced by /n/. The patterns of voiceless velar plosive /k/ replaced with the voiceless alveolar plosive /t/ and the velar nasal /ŋ/ with the alveolar nasal /n/ are also found in Rafanda's speech; but for the voiced velar plosive /g/, Rafanda replaced with the voiceless alveolar plosive /t/ instead of the voice alveolar plosive /d/, as can be seen below. The last fronting process is for substituting the alveolar nasal /n/ for the velar nasal /ŋ/. The example is for Javanese language of Angel (difficult). The proper pronunciation should be [aŋɛl]; but Rafanda pronounces [anɛl]. In line with the report of Smith (1993, as cited in Bernthal, Bankson, & Flipsen, 2016), he reported that this pattern is still common pattern occurred in a child between 2-3 years of ages to replace the velar nasal /ŋ/ with alveolar nasal /n/.

Assimilatory Processes
The second process of phonological processes is assimilatory processes. These processes occur when there is a tendency to assimilate one segment of words into another segment. These processes are the rarest process occurred in Rafanda's speech. There is only one type of assimilatory processes, consonant harmony.

Consonant Harmony
This process occurs when the pattern of C1VC2(X) syllables consisting of two different consonants experienced assimilatory process of one of the consonant to another consonant in a certain predicted ways with three frequent patterns, velar assimilation, labial assimilation, and denasalization (Ingram, 1976). From the three patterns, there is only one pattern of the consonant harmony, labial assimilation, as can be seen below.  [dawah]. The process of consonant harmony will be eliminated by a child in approximate age of 3.9 (Bowen, 2015) or 4.0 years (Grunwell, 1987, as cited in Alexander, Matthews, & Murphy, 2015.

Syllable Structure Processes
The syllable structure processes are motivated by the tendencies of the children to simplify the syllable structure such as cluster reduction, deletion of final consonant, deletion of weak syllable, and reduplication. The cluster reduction is commonly the most dominant syllable structure processes undergone by a child (Ingram, 1976). However, there are only found two types of syllable structure processes undergone by Rafanda with initial consonant deletion as the most dominant process in which the initial consonant deletion does not exist in the Ingram's theory (1976).

Initial Consonant Deletion
The first type of syllable structure processes is initial consonant deletion. In English language, initial consonant deletion is not attested (Bowen, 2015) for example James, Ferguson, & Butcher (2016) only found final consonant deletion; and there is no initial consonant deletion in Australian English speakers. However, this process is the most dominant process undergone by Rafanda when he is speaking. In addition, Fabiano-Smith & Cuzner (2018) reports that complexity of syllable type does not motivate initial consonant deletion in bilingual children at average ages of 48 months. They found that the initial consonant deletion occurs in disyllables, trisyllables, and tetrasyllables without affecting the syllable forms. However, Rafanda at ages of 18 months only did initial deletion in disyllables; and there is no initial deletion in words with trisyllables or tetrasyllables. There are ten words containing initial consonant deletion, as can be seen below. There is also initial consonant deletion followed by other phonological processes. For example, when Rafanda is asked about his name by his babysitter; he answers [aca] instead of [rafa]. There are two processes occurred, initial consonant deletion of the alveolar trill /r/ and substitution of the voiced palatal plosive /c/ for the voiceless labiodental fricative /f/. This result is in line with the Ingram's report (1976) that the syllable structure processes often occur with another process such as substitution and assimilatory processes. From the Table 4 above, it can be concluded that the initial consonant deletion only occurred in disyllabic words; and Rafanda faces difficulty to pronounce the consonant in the beginning of words.

Deletion of Weak Syllable
The second type of syllable structure processes is deletion of weak syllable. These processes are the second frequent processes undergone by Rafanda. There are nine words containing deletion of weak syllable, as can be seen below.

Words without Phonological Processes
Besides the three types of phonological processes, there are also found words without phonological processes undergone by Rafanda. There are four words that Rafanda is able to pronounce it correctly, as can be seen below.

Conclusion
This study reveals that the phonological processes undergone by Rafanda, a 18months Javanese-Indonesia toddler, are divided into three categories, substitution, assimilatory, and syllable structure processes. The syllable structure processes with the initial consonant deletion are the most dominant processes. Rafanda tends to omit the initial consonant in words with disyllables, trisyllables and tetrasyllables. For the words with trisyllables and tetrasyllables, there will be deletion of weak syllable to become disyllables. If the disyllables begin with consonant, so Rafanda will do deletion of initial consonant frequently.
There are also some phonemes that Rafanda tends to substitute for other phonemes such as the voiceless velar plosive /k/ and the voiced velar plosive /g/ are replaced with the voiceless alveolar plosive /t/; the velar nasal /ŋ/ with the alveolar nasal /n/; voiceless alveolar fricative /s/ and voiceless labiodental fricative /f/ with the voiced palatal plosive /c/.
However, there are also some words that can be pronounced correctly by Rafanda such as [mimi] (drink), [mama] (mommy), and [dɛdɛ] (bother). These words are able to pronounce correctly because at age of 6 and 8 months, an infant usually babbles a single syllable repeatedly such as [ma] [ma] [ma]. Therefore, Rafanda does not face any difficulty to pronounce these words.