Lambda

Text
Sunday, February 19, 2017
 * 1) Hermann (27;8.10, white (German), Chief of K-Sci, (JTech division)[1]) sits on the ladder, Fei Yen perched on his arm.
 * 2) "Which one would you like to know?" he asks.
 * 3) Fei Yen (1;1.13, Chinese, Marshal's daughter) points. "Da one."
 * 4) "This one?"
 * 5) Fei Yen nods.
 * 6) "This is lambda."
 * 7) "Naaama."
 * 8) Hermann stifles a laugh. "Llama?"
 * 9) Fei Yen frowns. "Nama. Na-ma."
 * 10) "May I call it 'llama', anyway? I much prefer it to Lambda."
 * 11) Fei Yen makes a show of thinking about it, then nods. "Yesh."
 * 12) He draws ears and a tail on the letter. "The greek letter llama."
 * 13) Fei Yen giggles. "Nama."
 * 14) Hermann shifts her on his arm. "I use it for wavelengths and semantics and also for calculating how much hay to buy." He 'corrects' another one. "The llama equation. The most irate constant in all mathematics."

Meta
[1]: “K-Science” is the study of Kaiju, the giant monsters attacking from the ocean. “JTech” is short for “Jaeger technology”, so Hermann is in charge of developing anti-Kaiju upgrades for the Jaegers.

* I wish I could figure out what to search for ‘needing to see the face to attach the voice’.

Fei Yen is three months past her first words. At this point, gestures have as much a role in her lexicon as spoken words (only deitic gestures are shown [3]; Clark, 2009) and her production capability is hindered by her still-developing brain (Goodluck, 2001). Children tend to reduplicate the first syllable (partial, in the case of [7, 9, 13]) and delete the final consonant ([d] in [3, 7, 9, 13]) (Hoff, 2013).

Fei Yen cannot produce the fricative [ð] and lateral liquid [l], which is typical of children using their first words (Hoff, 2013:123). She is substituting the stop [d] for the [ð] [3, 16], and the nasal [n] for the [l] [7, 9, 19, 21] as both [d] and [n] are early acquired sounds, the former of which consistently appears across children’s early production vocabulary (Hoff, 2013). As for why children’s phonological processes replace targets with sounds they cannot produce in other environments, in this case, the fricative [s] another fricative, [ʃ], no one really knows (Lust, 2006).

Also illustrated, in [9], is children's ability to recognize their own deformations; that is, they are saying the target word perfectly but they cannot produce it and they know it (Lust, 2006). In this case, Fei Yen vocalizes her recognition with her attempt at contrastive stress, however a child's control over their vocal system at this age is rather sloppy and will not be that precise until they are almost three (Goodluck, 2001).