Acquisition of complex syllabic onsets in Catalan children
The acquisition of complex onsets in word-initial position has been an area of interest in the field of phonological acquisition. The aim of this MA thesis is to offer an account of word-initial complex onset production in Catalan children, based on the work by Jongstra (2003) for Dutch framed withi...
| Autor: | |
|---|---|
| Tipo de recurso: | tesis de maestría |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2023 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona |
| Repositorio: | Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB |
| Idioma: | inglés |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:ddd.uab.cat:283173 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://ddd.uab.cat/record/283173 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Consonant cluster Complex onset Language acquisition Phonology Catalan |
| Sumario: | The acquisition of complex onsets in word-initial position has been an area of interest in the field of phonological acquisition. The aim of this MA thesis is to offer an account of word-initial complex onset production in Catalan children, based on the work by Jongstra (2003) for Dutch framed within Optimality Theory. The empirical base of the study is an elicitation task administered to 27 children acquiring Catalan between the ages of 2;2 and 3;3. The story featured 3 items for each voiceless word-initial consonant cluster in Catalan (namely [pɾ, pl, tɾ, kɾ, kl, fɾ, fl]). The results of the experiment show that Catalan children present a consistent pattern of cluster reduction to C1, contrasting with the patterns observed for Spanish and Dutch children. In addition, the experiment reveals that there is a hierarchy regarding the acquisition of word-initial CCs, greatly influenced by the relative sonority between the consonants in the cluster, favoring the production of clusters where the distance in sonority is higher. However, production of word-initial CCs is not within-cluster stable, showing that different mechanisms of word-initial CC production coexist in the language of the same child, at least for a period of time. Another innovation of the present thesis is that it considers the effect of frequency of the target word-initial CCs in language acquisition. The results indicate, however, that frequency does not play a relevant role in complex onset acquisition, whereas relative sonority does. |
|---|