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The prosodic licensing of coda consonants in early speech: interactions with vowel length

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2015

KELLY MILES ,
IVAN YUEN ,
FELICITY COX  and
KATHERINE DEMUTH
KELLY MILES*
Affiliation:
Macquarie University, Australia
IVAN YUEN
Affiliation:
Macquarie University, Australia
FELICITY COX
Affiliation:
Macquarie University, Australia
KATHERINE DEMUTH
Affiliation:
Macquarie University, Australia
*
[*]Address for correspondence: Kelly Miles, Macquarie University – Linguistics, 5th floor, Building C5A Room 508, Balaclava Road, New South Wales 2109, Australia. e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

English has a word-minimality requirement that all open-class lexical items must contain at least two moras of structure, forming a bimoraic foot (Hayes, 1995).Thus, a word with either a long vowel, or a short vowel and a coda consonant, satisfies this requirement. This raises the question of when and how young children might learn this language-specific constraint, and if they would use coda consonants earlier and more reliably after short vowels compared to long vowels. To evaluate this possibility we conducted an elicited imitation experiment with 15 two-year-old Australian English-speaking children, using both perceptual and acoustic analysis. As predicted, the children produced codas more often when preceded by short vowels. The findings suggest that English-speaking two-year-olds are sensitive to language-specific lexical constraints, and are more likely to use coda consonants when prosodically required.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 43 , Issue 2 , March 2016 , pp. 265 - 283
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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