t is widely accepted that in the field of functional (non-organic) speech disorders in Japanese, there are ‘typical’ misarticulation patterns. It has also been pointed out, on the other hand, that there are ‘atypical’ cases which exhibit deviant errors that do not conform with the common error patterns.
The present paper is addressed to the solution of this apparently paradoxical problem by appealing to three linguistically significant concepts, namely underlying and phonetic representations and phonological rules. It is argued that any system can and has to have ambient-like or deviant underlying and phonetic representations. It is also argued that errors are not necessarily governed by dynamic phonological rules, either ambient-like or deviant. The present analysis results in a typological classification of eight types across the misarticulating population. The typology properly covers each and every misarticulation system. This analysis also claims that the ‘typical’ and ‘atypical’ paradox is reduced to a mere statistical problem among the eight types of disordered systems.
*This research was suported in part by grants from the United States National Institute of Health (NS20976, DC00260) and by a grant-in-aid from the Japanese Ministry of Education for the Specially Promoted Project ‘Emergence of Human Cognition & Language’.