In this article, a number of broad questions related to the acquisition of consonant clusters in a second language are investigated. Drawing on the structural relations and phonological principles of Government Phonology, it is argued that the behaviour of second language learners can be accounted for by a top-down, left-to-right phonological parser. Appealing to a model of cognitive architecture, it is demonstrated that one can account for the different behaviours of speakers of languages that share the trait of lacking tautosyllabic clusters (Korean and Finnish) when learning a language which allows such clusters (English). Properties of the LI segmental inventory and a licensing strength scale are proposed to explain why Finnish learners have less trouble than Korean learners when acquiring English clusters.

This article considers three children’s acquisition of tauto- and heterosyllabic consonant clusters in Spanish within the framework of Optimality Theory. Each child presents with a unique phonological system with respect to the cluster types. One child, BL4 (female, aged 2;8), reduces tautosyllabic clusters to the least sonorous singleton, but preserves both segments in production of heterosyllabic clusters. A second child, SD1 (female, aged 3;4), preserves both segments of tautosyllabic clusters, but reduces heterosyllabic clusters to the least sonorous singleton. Finally, a third child, SD2 (female, 3;9), reduces both types of clusters, maintaining the least sonorous segment; however, a different pattern is observed with the nasal + voiced stop clusters, which reduce to the most sonorous segment. The inter- and intra-child variation is accounted for by an appeal to general markedness and faithfulness constraints that have been motivated elsewhere in the literature in accounting for syllabic and segmental phenomena in acquisition and beyond.

It has commonly been proposed that there is a stage in development where children’s early productions are binary feet, or minimal words. However, the present study of a French-speaking child (1;1–1;8) finds an extended period where both CVC and disyllabic target words are truncated to CV after initially being produced as reduplicated CiVCiV forms. That is, the child appears to regress, failing to produce disyllabic forms that could be produced earlier. This article proposes an explanation for this apparent regression in terms of segmental-prosodic constraint interaction, where the child’s limited segmental inventory, in conjunction with the high frequency of CV lexical items in everyday French, conspire to yield subminimal truncations as “optimal” at this stage in development. These findings provide support for a growing body of literature showing the importance of both constraint interaction and frequency effects in early production, arguing for a more probabilistic approach to theories of language learning.

It is proposed that failure to consistently produce inflectional morphology by Mandarin-speaking learners of English is due to properties of the LI prosodic phonology which are transferred into the interlanguage grammar. While English requires inflection to be adjoined to the Prosodic Word, Mandarin does not permit this structure. Inflection in Mandarin is instead incorporated into the PWd of the stem to which it attaches. It is shown that Mandarin speakers fall into two groups in their treatment of English inflectional morphology. One group of learners is sensitive to the need for a unified analysis of inflection. They recognize that English does not permit a stem-internal analysis of this morphology, but as their grammars do not permit adjunction, inflection is deleted across-the-board. For the other group, inflection surfaces variably, for those stimuli where the shape of the stem enables it to be incorporated into the PWd, as in the L1.

This article reports on between-individual and within-individual variation in consonant cluster reduction strategies (where C1C2 is realised as C( or C2) among young children. The empirical base of the study is a Dutch database with over 9,000 instances of C1 and C2 realisations of 23 word-initial consonant clusters from 45 children aged between two and three years old. The study finds that within-child variation is very limited, whereas between-child variation occurs. It is also shown that there are typological implications; that is, realising C2 in cluster y, implies realising C2 in cluster y, but not vice versa. The data provide support for the position that variation can be accounted for by a finer grained notion of sonority where the sonority distance between the two consonants in a cluster plays a crucial role in establishing prosodic constituency.

In this article, two approaches to schwa representation are evaluated using data from four German children (aged 1;3 to 3;1). The first, the No Mora account, claims that schwa is segmentally but not prosodically specified, whereas the second, the Projection account, proposes that schwa is prosodically but only minimally segmentally specified, as [-cons]. The data reveal several stages in acquisition: an early phase characterised by vowel reduplication or deletion; a middle phase characterised by production of a full vowel (and consonant); and a final phase characterised by production of a central vowel, schwa, or syllabic consonant. In addition, the data show that children produce syllabic consonants earlier than schwa, and that they often produce filler schwas even when they substitute target schwas with full vowels. It is argued that these findings, in particular the different timeline observed for schwa versus syllabic consonants and the presence of filler schwas, can be best accounted for by the Projection account.

Empirical and theoretical claims about the markedness of place features and associated context effects are evaluated against the facts of acquisition. The primary focus is on the segmental inventories and substitution patterns of young children with phonological delays (ages 3;0-8;6). Results are reported from a large scale cross-sectional archival study of 211 children. Additionally, two especially challenging case studies are singled out for consideration. A typological account of the cross-sectional variation is formulated in optimality theoretic terms and requires permutable rankings of place-referring constraints. Consideration is also given to the different statistical trends along with a comparison of developing and fully developed languages.

This article presents an autosegmental analysis of the development of pitch phonology in Swedish and Japanese, which mark both lexical accent and phrasing through movements in fundamental frequency (F0). Predictions that follow from the autosegmental model are tested against spontaneous production data from child Japanese. In support of the analysis that lexical pitch accent and phrasal intonation are acquired as separate sequences of tonal features, the falling and rising slopes of F0 contours are shown to develop independently. The late emergence of the phrase-initial rise is attributable to the allophonic surface realisation of the low boundary tone. Moreover, developments in contour shapes are characterised by demarcated emergence of F0 turning points that are aligned with specific segments, providing further support for the view that pitch phonology is acquired as strings of tonal units associated with segments and prosodic constituents.

In child language, consonants often assimilate in primary place of articulation across intervening vowels. In adult language, primary place assimilation occurs only between adjacent consonants. In both cases, the first consonant usually assimilates to the second. The standard analysis of directionality of local assimilation in Optimality Theory uses positional faithfulness to protect the second consonant. In this article, it is argued that directionality in child language assimilation is due not to positional faithfulness, but to a markedness constraint that specifies that a consonant preceding a dorsal must agree in place of articulation with it. Along with directionality, this constraint accounts for cases in which dorsals, but not labials, trigger assimilation, which occurs in Korean as well as in child language. Differences between the attested types of assimilation in adult and child language can be explained by differences in the activity of positional faithfulness in the two domains.

This article focusses on data from two first language learners of Québec French, Clara and Théo. In both corpora, all word-final consonants are acquired before word-medial codas, except Clara’s [ʁ], which is acquired at the same time as medial codas. The behaviour of Clara’s [ʁ] is explained through the hypothesis that it is analysed by the child as placeless and that, in the unmarked case, place-specified consonants are syllabified word-finally as onsets, while placeless consonants are syllabified as codas. Supporting cross-linguistic evidence is provided from adult languages and from the acquisition of Japanese. Finally, data on the acquisition of Spanish are discussed. Based on distributional evidence, it is suggested that these learners of Spanish posit a coda syllabification for the word-final, place-specified coronal consonants of their language. These data support the view that default options are overridden when positive evidence steers the learner toward more marked options.