CRD42012002107.

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This article reports on a study into the acquisition of Welsh and English phonology in Welsh -English bilingual children. It concentrates on the acquisition of the rhotic consonants, that is the trilled -r of Welsh and the approximant-r of English. The trilled -r shows differential patterns of acquisition depending on the age and language dominance of the subjects. It also demonstrates a wide range of substitutions, and it is argued that some of these may be due to influence from English, while others seem to be used because of their acoustic similarity to the target. Much less variation is found with the substitutions used for approximantr, and it is shown that, again, there is an acoustic reason for the choice of the commonest of them. While the two sounds clearly are different, neither the trill nor the approximant demonstrate 100% accurate usage even in the oldest age group of subjects (4;6 -5;0) (although the approximant does approach 90% ). Therefore, they belong to the group of consonants acquired last in their respective languages.

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Acoustic and electropalatographic data on the so-called Hiberno-English ‘slit-t’ are reported, and the implications these data have for an adequate transcription are discussed. Previous transcription suggestions highlight the difficulty posed by the lack of an IPA diacritic for tongue shape. We conclude that the adoption of an alveolar diacritic (as used in the extensions to the IPA for transcribing disordered speech) could get round these difficulties.

While the history of interest in voice quality dates back at least as far as Henry Sweet (e.g. 1890), there was for many years little agreement on how to classify voice quality or how to transcribe it as part of a phonetic transcription. Indeed, there is not even agreement on precisely what the term covers in that it is often restricted to aspects of voice quality derived from vocal fold activity, rather than the fuller meaning which encompasses features derived from supralaryngeal settings of the articulators. Authors such as Nolan (1983) have used the phrase long-term quality as an alternative; however, in this article we will retain the traditional term but with a wide application to account for voice quality derived from airflow features, vocal fold activity, and supralaryngeal activity.

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