TY - JOUR
T1 - The prosodic licensing of coda consonants in early speech
T2 - Interactions with vowel length
AU - Miles, Kelly
AU - Yuen, Ivan
AU - Cox, Felicity
AU - Demuth, Katherine
PY - 2016/3/1
Y1 - 2016/3/1
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84930163772&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1017/S0305000915000185
DO - 10.1017/S0305000915000185
M3 - Article
C2 - 26017220
AN - SCOPUS:84930163772
VL - 43
SP - 265
EP - 283
JO - Journal of Child Language
JF - Journal of Child Language
SN - 0305-0009
IS - 2
ER -