Cross-Language Differences in Phonological Acquisition: Swedish and American /t/
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Carol Stoel-Gammon
Abstract
Our understanding of phonological acquisition has benefited immensely from cross-linguistic investigations which allow researchers to separate biological and learned factors. To date, most cross-linguistic studies have focused either on differences in phonetic inventories or on differences in frequency of occurrence of particular phonetic and phonological properties in the adult language. This paper describes a third type of study: comparisons of segments that occur in two (or more) languages but differ in their phonetic properties. We present perceptual and acoustic analyses of adult and child productions of word-initial alveolar /t/ in American English and dental /t/ in Swedish. Results showed that listeners’ perception of place of articulation was strongly associated with language (alveolar: American English, dental: Swedish) for both adult and child tokens, and was effective in assigning individual speakers to language groups. Three acoustic measures, voice onset time, burst intensity and burst spectral diffuseness correlated with language for both child and adult tokens; the latter two measures correlated with perception as well. The findings suggest that American and Swedish children at 30 months of age have acquired some language-specific phonetic aspects of/t/ phonemes.
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© 1994 S. Karger AG, Basel
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Special Section
- Contents, Vol. 51, No.1-3, 1991
- Paper
- Editors’ Introduction
- ‘Speaker’ and ‘Speech’ Characteristics: A Deductive Approach
- From EMG to Formant Patterns of Vowels: The Implication of Vowel Spaces
- Individual Variation in Measures of Voice
- Glottal Stops and Glottalization in German
- Tongue Body Kinematics in Velar Stop Production: Influences of Consonant Voicing and Vowel Context
- What’s in a Schwa?
- Durational Correlates of Quantity in Swedish, Finnish and Estonian: Cross-Language Evidence for a Theory of Adaptive Dispersion
- Evidence for the Adaptive Nature of Speech on the Phrase Level and Below
- Some Distributional Facts about Fricatives and a Perceptual Explanation
- Listeners’ Normalization of Vowel Quality Is Influenced by ‘Restored’ Consonantal Context
- The Phonological Reality of Locus Equations across Manner Class Distinctions: Preliminary Observations
- Musical Significance of Musicians’ Syllable Choice in Improvised Nonsense Text Singing: A Preliminary Study
- Cross-Language Differences in Phonological Acquisition: Swedish and American /t/
- The Nature and Origins of Ambient Language Influence on Infant Vocal Production and Early Words
- Conventional, Biological and Environmental Factors in Speech Communication: A Modulation Theory
- Prolegomena to a Theory of the Sound Pattern of the First Spoken Language
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Special Section
- Contents, Vol. 51, No.1-3, 1991
- Paper
- Editors’ Introduction
- ‘Speaker’ and ‘Speech’ Characteristics: A Deductive Approach
- From EMG to Formant Patterns of Vowels: The Implication of Vowel Spaces
- Individual Variation in Measures of Voice
- Glottal Stops and Glottalization in German
- Tongue Body Kinematics in Velar Stop Production: Influences of Consonant Voicing and Vowel Context
- What’s in a Schwa?
- Durational Correlates of Quantity in Swedish, Finnish and Estonian: Cross-Language Evidence for a Theory of Adaptive Dispersion
- Evidence for the Adaptive Nature of Speech on the Phrase Level and Below
- Some Distributional Facts about Fricatives and a Perceptual Explanation
- Listeners’ Normalization of Vowel Quality Is Influenced by ‘Restored’ Consonantal Context
- The Phonological Reality of Locus Equations across Manner Class Distinctions: Preliminary Observations
- Musical Significance of Musicians’ Syllable Choice in Improvised Nonsense Text Singing: A Preliminary Study
- Cross-Language Differences in Phonological Acquisition: Swedish and American /t/
- The Nature and Origins of Ambient Language Influence on Infant Vocal Production and Early Words
- Conventional, Biological and Environmental Factors in Speech Communication: A Modulation Theory
- Prolegomena to a Theory of the Sound Pattern of the First Spoken Language
