| ROA: | 400 |
|---|---|
| Title: | First steps in the acquisition of German consonants: minimal constraint demotion |
| Authors: | Janet Grijzenhout, Sandra Joppen |
| Comment: | |
| Length: | 26 |
| Abstract: | First Steps in the Acquisition of German Consonants: Minimal Constraint Demotion Janet Grijzenhout & Sandra Joppen Heinrich-Heine-Universität, Düsseldorf The paper examines the acquisition of word-initial and word-final consonants by one German child, Naomi, between age 1;2.06 and 1;8.21 and compares the findings with data from another German child and from English, Dutch, and Portuguese children. Two standard assumptions in the literature on the early acquisition of phonology (e.g., Fikkert 1994a,b, Ingram 1978, Jakobson 1941) are: (i) the first words in child speech consist of a consonant followed by a vowel and (ii) the first consonants that appear in child speech are oral plosives. From these two assumptions the following predictions ensue: (i) vowel-initial words are absent in early child speech and (ii) consonants are initially realised as plosives. These predictions are not answered in the study of child speech that we present in this paper. We show that the first words in German child speech consist of at least one consonant and one vowel and the consonant may either precede or follow the vowel. Also, word-final fricatives may be realised as such from the onset of speech. Word-initial fricatives are deleted at the earliest word stage and, in contrast to the predictions formulated above, they are not necessarily replaced by any other consonant. Our findings are confirmed by another study on German child speech (Elsen 1991) and also support the findings of a study on Portuguese child speech where it is argued that children produce vowel-initial words at the earliest acquisition stage (Costa & Freitas 1998). The aim of this paper is to provide an account of the initial stages in the acquisition of German onsets and codas, respectively. We demonstrate how an Optimality-theoretic approach can account for the fact that a word-final consonant is realised by Naomi and Annalena (see Elsen 1991) only in the absence of a word-initial consonant. We also account for the observation that an adult VVC or VCC rhyme is first realised with a long vowel without a following consonant, then with a short vowel plus a consonant, and finally as a tripositional rhyme. We argue that these observed stages arise through the gradual increase in complexity of syllable structure and minimal constraint demotion (see Tesar & Smolensky 1993, 1998). We furthermore show that the same set of constraints and the mechanism of constraint demotion can be used to explain different stages in the acquisition of Dutch consonants. |
| Type: | Paper/tech report |
| Area/Keywords: | |
| Article: | Version 1 |