- Fis phenomenon
The "fis" phenomenon is a phenomenon of child
language acquisition that demonstrates that perception ofphoneme s occurs earlier than the ability of the child to produce those phonemes. It is also illustrative of a larger theme in child language acquisition: that skills in linguistic comprehension generally precede corresponding skills in linguistic production.The name comes from an incident reported in 1960 by J. Berko and R. Brown [cite book | chapter = Psycholinguistic Research Methods | author = J. Berko and R. Brown | title = Handbook of Research methods in
Child Development | editor = P. Mussen | location = New York | publisher = John Wiley | year = 1960 | pages = 517–557 ] . A child referred to his inflatable plastic fish as a "fis". However, when adults asked him, "Is this your "fis"?" he rejected the statement. When he was asked, "Is this your fish?" he responded, "Yes, my fis."This shows that although the child could not produce the phoneme IPA|/ʃ/, he could perceive it as being different from the phoneme IPA|/s/. This has important implications for the acquisition of
phonology . In short, it means that children have more, not fewer, phonological processes (or rules) applying in their speech than adults, and that part of the task of acquiring a language is figuring out which processes to allow to apply and which to suppress.ee also
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Language acquisition References
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