A new longitudinal diary study of a child (E) learning American English reveals two patterns of segmental neutralization: velar fronting, in which /k/ and /g/ are realized as [t] and [d], and lateral gliding, in which /l/ is realized as [j]. Both phenomena are restricted to prosodically strong positions, affecting only consonants in word-initial position or in the onsets of stressed syllables. An explanation for positional velar fronting that combines phonetic and grammatical considerations is proposed to account for the occurrence of the effect in children but not adults: the greater gestural magnitude of prosodically strong onsets in English interacts with the anatomy of the young child’s vocal tract to produce coronalization of prosodically strong velars. E extended the resulting pattern to lateral gliding, which developed later and has similar grammatical conditioning but less direct phonetic motivation.*
Preliminaries 1Several recent investigations of the development of left-edge clusters in West Germanic languages have demonstrated that the relative sonority of adjacent consonants plays a key role in children's reduction patterns (e.g. Fikkert 1994, Gilbers & Den Ouden 1994, Chin 1996, Barlow 1997, Bernhardt & Stemberger 1998, Gierut 1999, Ohala 1999.These authors have argued that, for a number of children, at the stage in development when only one member of a left-edge cluster is produced, it is the least sonorous segment that survives, regardless of where this segment appears in the target string or the structural position that it occupies (head, dependent, or appendix). To briefly illustrate, while the more sonorous /S/ 2 is lost in favour of the stop in /S/+stop clusters, /S/ is retained in /S/+sonorant clusters; similarly, the least sonorous stop survives in both /S/+stop and stop+sonorant clusters, in spite of the fact that it occurs in different positions in the two strings. To account for reduction patterns such as these, a structural difference between /S/-initial and stop-initial clusters need not be assumed. This would seem to fare well in view of much of the recent constraint-based literature which de-emphasises the role of prosodic constituency in favour of phonetically-based explanations of phonological phenomena (see e.g. Hamilton 1996, Wright 1996, Kochetov 1999, Steriade 1999, Côté 2000.In this paper, we focus on a second set of reduction patterns for left-edge clusters, one which is not addressed in most of the sonority-based literature on cluster reduction in child language (L1): these patterns reveal a preference for structural heads to survive.
In this paper, I discuss a number of relations that take place between melodic content and higher prosodic structure in first language phonological development. I explore acquisition patterns found in data on the acquisition of Québec French. Starting with the observation that prosodic structure and, more specifically, stressed syllables, play a central role in phonological acquisition, I hypothesize that the inter-relations between prosodic and segmental structure posited by formal models of phonological organisation should be witnessed within and across developmental stages. I support this hypothesis through two findings from the French data. First, complex onsets emerge in stressed syllables before unstressed ones. Second, different types of consonants (placeless versus place-specified) emerge in word-final position at different stages. From these observations, I argue that the phenomena observed in these data are best captured in an analysis based on constituent structure and relationships between feature specification and prosodic constituency, which are governed by universal markedness.
The field of study on the acquisition of phonological productive abilities by first-language learners in the Romance languages has been largely focused on three main languages: French, Portuguese, and Spanish, including various dialects of these languages spoken in Europe as well as in the Americas. In this article, we provide a comparative survey of this literature, with an emphasis on representational phonology. We also include in our discussion observations from the development of Catalan and Italian, and mention areas where these languages, as well as Romanian, another major Romance language, would provide welcome additions to our cross-linguistic comparisons. Together, the various studies we summarize reveal intricate patterns of development, in particular concerning the acquisition of consonants across different positions within the syllable, the word, and in relation to stress, documented from both monolingual and bilingual first-language learners can be found. The patterns observed across the different languages and dialects can generally be traced to formal properties of phone distributions, as entailed by mainstream theories of phonological representation, with variations also predicted by more functional aspects of speech, including phonetic factors and usage frequency. These results call for further empirical studies of phonological development, in particular concerning Romanian, in addition to Catalan and Italian, whose phonological and phonetic properties offer compelling grounds for the formulation and testing of models of phonology and phonological development.
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