| ROA: | 304 |
|---|---|
| Title: | First Steps in the Acquisition of German Phonology: A Case Study |
| Authors: | Janet Grijzenhout, Sandra Joppen |
| Comment: | |
| Length: | 24 |
| Abstract: | First Steps in the Acquisition of German Phonology: A Case Study Janet Grijzenhout & Sandra Joppen The first words in child speech supposedly have a CV-structure (e.g., Jakobson 1941/68) and they are thus characterised by the presence of an onset. In this paper, we will present evidence against this assumption. In the speech of Naomi - the German child that we examined - we found that between the ages of 1;2;6 and 1,5;01 each word contains at least and at most one consonantal place of articulation. It is striking that the consonant in question may but must not be initial. We argue that previous accounts of the acquisition of syllable structure (e.g. Fikkert 1994) cannot be right and that the facts are best captured by an analysis that uses the correspondence version of Optimality Theory (McCarthy & Prince 1995). We will formulate a constraint that says that every word should have a consonantal place of articulation (C-Place). The constraint called ONSET, which says that syllables must have a consonant in onset position, never plays a prominent role in German child speech. We will also show that Naomi does not realise fricatives at the earliest stage of acquisition. Later, she replaces word-initial fricatives by voiced stops and we will formulte constraints that help to explain that the best output for a word which has an initial fricative in the adult form, is a word which has an initial voiced stop. These constraints are satisfied in words which begin in stops, nasals, or /l/. A condition against inserting material (formulated as 'DEP I-O' by McCarthy & Prince 1995) seems to be inviolable. From 1;6;05, Naomi realises stops and approximants instead of fricatives (e.g. fertig --> 'jatig, 'datig (1;7:16, 1;7:27) 'ready'). This suggests to us that faithfulness conditions such as 'realise the input feature [+continuant]' (IDENTITY [+cont]) begin to play a more prominent role. We aim to show that at the initial word-stage, each position in the word has its own preferences for particular phonological features and that gradually, preference laws begin to be outranked by faithfulness conditions on separate features. |
| Type: | Paper/tech report |
| Area/Keywords: | |
| Article: | Version 1 |