Some Cross-Linguistic Evidence for Modulation of Implicational Universals by Language-Specific Frequency Effects in Phonological Development

Abstract

While broad-focus comparisons of consonant inventories across children acquiring different language can suggest that phonological development follows a universal sequence, finer-grained statistical comparisons can reveal systematic differences. This cross-linguistic study of word-initial lingual obstruents examined some effects of language-specific frequencies on consonant mastery. Repetitions of real words were elicited from 2-and 3-year-old children who were monolingual speakers of English, Cantonese, Greek, or Japanese. The repetitions were recorded and transcribed by an adult native speaker for each language. Results found support for both language-universal effects in phonological acquisition and for language-specific influences related to phoneme and phoneme sequence frequency. These results suggest that acquisition patterns that are common across languages arise in two ways. One influence is direct, via the universal constraints imposed by the physiology and physics of speech production and perception, and how these predict which contrasts will be easy and which will be difficult for the child to learn to control. The other influence is indirect, via the way universal principles of ease of perception and production tend to influence the lexicons of many languages through commonly attested sound changes.In his influential monograph on child language, aphasia, and phonological universals, Jakobson (1941Jakobson ( /1968 hypothesized that there are universal substantive principles -"implicational laws" -that structure the phoneme inventories of all spoken languages and that also determine how children acquire speech sounds. For example, one substantive principle that Jakobson noted, regarding phonation type contrasts, is that the presence of voiced and/or aspirated stops in an inventory necessarily implies the presence of voiceless unaspirated stops. In conjunction with this cross-language generalization, he predicted that young children, regardless of the language they are learning, will produce voiceless unaspirated stops before they produce either voiceless aspirated stops or voiced stops.Jakobson's proposal of a half-century ago continues to influence our thinking about child phonology today, despite the fact that his two more specific claims about the ways that these principles operate in determining the course of phonological acquisition have been conclusively disproven. These claims were the following. First, there is a clear discontinuity between the large inventory of sounds that children produce in babbling and the more limited inventory of vowel and consonant phonemes that children produce in their first words. Second, all children acquire the same early vowels and consonants, regardless of the specific language to be learned, and each child expands this initial inventory in a rigid universal order. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptLang Learn Dev. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2009 November 3. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author ManuscriptAmong subsequen...

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