THE INFLUENCE OF FREQUENCY ON WORD-INITIAL OBSTRUENT ACQUISITION IN HEXAGONAL FRENCH

Julia Monnin1, Hélène Loevenbruck2 & Mary Beckman3
1EA Transcultures & ICP, Speech and Cognition Department, GIPSA-lab; 2ICP, Speech and Cognition Department, GIPSA-lab; 3Department of Linguistics, Ohio State University

ID 1660
[full paper]

The present study is part of a larger cross-linguistic comparison of phonological development. The aim is to compare production of word-initial obstruents across pairs of languages which have comparable consonants that differ either in overall frequency or in the frequency with which they occur in analogous sound sequences. By comparing across languages, the influence of language-specific distributional patterns on consonant mastery can be disentangled from the effects of more general phonetic constraints on development. The present study aims at extending the comparison to Hexagonal French. We report frequency measures obtained on French databases and results of a preliminary experiment with French-acquiring two-year-old children.