Word-minimality, Epenthesis and Coda Licensing in the Early Acquisition of English

Abstract

Many languages exhibit constraints on prosodic words, where lexical items must be composed of at least two moras of structure, or a binary foot. Demuth and Fee (1995) proposed that children demonstrate early sensitivity to word-minimality effects, exhibiting a period of vowel lengthening or vowel epenthesis if coda consonants cannot be produced. This paper evaluates this proposal by examining the development of word-final coda consonants in the spontaneous speech of four English-speaking children between the ages of one and two. Although there was no evidence of vowel lengthening, coda consonants were more accurately produced in monosyllabic target words with monomoriac vowels, suggesting earlier use of coda consonants in contexts where they can be prosodified as part of a bimoraic foot. One child also showed extensive use of vowel epenthesis and coda consonant aspiration concurrent with the production of codas. However, we show that this was due to the articulatory challenges of producing complex syllable structures rather than an attempt to produce well-formed minimal words. These results suggest that learners of English may exhibit an early awareness of moraic structure at the level of the syllable, but that language-specific constraints regarding word-minimality may be acquired later than originally thought.

The longitudinal development of clusters in French

“…This was revealed by her frequent omission of simple word-initial /R/ (rouge ' red ' /RuZ/ >[uz]), or its realization as /l/ (rose 'rose ' /Roz/ >[loz]), and her reduction of word-initial clusters (prend 'take ' /pRã a/ >[pã a]). In addition, both Tim and Marie showed a word length effect, producing word-final consonants in disyllabic words approximately two months later than those in monosyllabic words (see Demuth, Culbertson & Alter (2006) for similar findings for English). Both children also showed a tendency to resyllabify word-final consonants that were followed by vowel-initial words, though they showed little in the way of epenthesis or aspiration with CVC words in other contexts.…”

Phonological Constraints on Children’s Production of English Third Person Singular – s

“…The data examined in this study were drawn from the Providence Corpus (Demuth, Culbertson, & Alter, 2006), a longitudinal corpus consisting of spontaneous speech interactions between 6 motherchild dyads from the southern New England region of the United States (for further information and access to the corpus, see the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES; see http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/). The profiles of the 6 children are shown in Table 1, along with their gender, age range studied, and MLU in morphemes.…”

An empirical generative framework for computational modeling of language acquisition

“…Out of the large English CHILDES collection, we chose eight corpora collected in relatively naturalistic settings (Bloom, 1970 ;Brown, 1973 ;Demuth, Culbertson & Alter, 2006 ;Hall, Nagy & Linn, 1984 ;Hall, Nagy & Nottenburg, 1981 ;Hall & Tirre, 1979 ;Higginson 1985 ;MacWhinney, 1995 ;Sachs, 1983 ;Suppes, 1974). Together, these totaled 349,187 adult utterances, comprising 2,426,578 word tokens.…”