The acquisition of coda consonants by Catalan and Spanish children: effects of prominence and frequency of exposure

One of the challenges of child language research is to identify the relevant factors that play a role in the acquisition course of a particular linguistic feature. This article analyzes the role of stress, word position, and word length in the acquisition of coda consonants by Catalan and Spanish ch...

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Authors: Borràs Comes, Joan Manel, 1984-, Prieto Vives, Pilar, 1965-
Format: article
Status:Published version
Publication Date:2013
Country:España
Institution:Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Repository:Repositorio Digital de la UPF
OAI Identifier:oai:repositori.upf.edu:10230/26977
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10230/26977
http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/probus-2013-0001
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Coda acquisition
Syllabic structure
Frequency effects
Prominence effects
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spelling The acquisition of coda consonants by Catalan and Spanish children: effects of prominence and frequency of exposureBorràs Comes, Joan Manel, 1984-Prieto Vives, Pilar, 1965-Coda acquisitionSyllabic structureFrequency effectsProminence effectsOne of the challenges of child language research is to identify the relevant factors that play a role in the acquisition course of a particular linguistic feature. This article analyzes the role of stress, word position, and word length in the acquisition of coda consonants by Catalan and Spanish children. The fact that the two languages differ substantially in their coda distribution (e.g., stressed word-final codas are more frequent in Catalan than in Spanish) will allow us to test the potential effects of coda distribution in the target language on early coda production. Sixteen Catalan-dominant and Spanish-dominant two-year-olds from the Barcelona area participated in two elicitation tasks with both novel and familiar words of different phonological shapes. Coda productions were assessed in stressed vs. unstressed syllables, in word-medial vs. word-final syllables, and in monosyllables vs. polysyllables. Results showed that the distributional difference between coda consonants in the two languages has crucial effects on the children’s coda production. That is, Catalan-dominant children produce significantly more stressed word-final codas than Spanish-dominant children. This result lends support to the idea that when prominence is held equal, as in a controlled experiment, there are still crosslinguistic differences in coda production that are consistent with the frequency distribution of coda consonants in the respective languages, which means that children are very closely attuned to the frequency patterns of prosodic structure in the input language and are aware of their specific distributions across the lexicon.This research has been funded by two research grants awarded by the Spanish Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia, FFI2009-07648/FILO “The role of tonal scaling and tonal alignment in distinguishing intonational categories in Catalan and Spanish” and CONSOLIDER-INGENIO 2010 “Bilingüismo y Neurociencia Cognitiva CSD2007-00012”, and also by a grant awarded by the Generalitat de Catalunya/nto Grup d’Estudis de Prosòdia (2009SGR-701).De Gruyter201620162013info:eu-repo/semantics/articleinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersionapplication/pdfapplication/pdfhttp://hdl.handle.net/10230/26977http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/probus-2013-0001reponame:Repositorio Digital de la UPFinstname:Universitat Pompeu FabraInglésProbus. 2014 May; 26(1): 59–82info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/3PN/FFI2009-07648info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/3PN/CSD2007-00012© De Gruyter Published version available at http://www.degruyter.com/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/probus-2013-0001info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccessoai:repositori.upf.edu:10230/269772026-06-12T07:21:37Z
dc.title.none.fl_str_mv The acquisition of coda consonants by Catalan and Spanish children: effects of prominence and frequency of exposure
title The acquisition of coda consonants by Catalan and Spanish children: effects of prominence and frequency of exposure
spellingShingle The acquisition of coda consonants by Catalan and Spanish children: effects of prominence and frequency of exposure
Borràs Comes, Joan Manel, 1984-
Coda acquisition
Syllabic structure
Frequency effects
Prominence effects
title_short The acquisition of coda consonants by Catalan and Spanish children: effects of prominence and frequency of exposure
title_full The acquisition of coda consonants by Catalan and Spanish children: effects of prominence and frequency of exposure
title_fullStr The acquisition of coda consonants by Catalan and Spanish children: effects of prominence and frequency of exposure
title_full_unstemmed The acquisition of coda consonants by Catalan and Spanish children: effects of prominence and frequency of exposure
title_sort The acquisition of coda consonants by Catalan and Spanish children: effects of prominence and frequency of exposure
dc.creator.none.fl_str_mv Borràs Comes, Joan Manel, 1984-
Prieto Vives, Pilar, 1965-
author Borràs Comes, Joan Manel, 1984-
author_facet Borràs Comes, Joan Manel, 1984-
Prieto Vives, Pilar, 1965-
author_role author
author2 Prieto Vives, Pilar, 1965-
author2_role author
dc.subject.none.fl_str_mv Coda acquisition
Syllabic structure
Frequency effects
Prominence effects
topic Coda acquisition
Syllabic structure
Frequency effects
Prominence effects
description One of the challenges of child language research is to identify the relevant factors that play a role in the acquisition course of a particular linguistic feature. This article analyzes the role of stress, word position, and word length in the acquisition of coda consonants by Catalan and Spanish children. The fact that the two languages differ substantially in their coda distribution (e.g., stressed word-final codas are more frequent in Catalan than in Spanish) will allow us to test the potential effects of coda distribution in the target language on early coda production. Sixteen Catalan-dominant and Spanish-dominant two-year-olds from the Barcelona area participated in two elicitation tasks with both novel and familiar words of different phonological shapes. Coda productions were assessed in stressed vs. unstressed syllables, in word-medial vs. word-final syllables, and in monosyllables vs. polysyllables. Results showed that the distributional difference between coda consonants in the two languages has crucial effects on the children’s coda production. That is, Catalan-dominant children produce significantly more stressed word-final codas than Spanish-dominant children. This result lends support to the idea that when prominence is held equal, as in a controlled experiment, there are still crosslinguistic differences in coda production that are consistent with the frequency distribution of coda consonants in the respective languages, which means that children are very closely attuned to the frequency patterns of prosodic structure in the input language and are aware of their specific distributions across the lexicon.
publishDate 2013
dc.date.none.fl_str_mv 2013
2016
2016
dc.type.none.fl_str_mv info:eu-repo/semantics/article
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
format article
status_str publishedVersion
dc.identifier.none.fl_str_mv http://hdl.handle.net/10230/26977
http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/probus-2013-0001
url http://hdl.handle.net/10230/26977
http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/probus-2013-0001
dc.language.none.fl_str_mv Inglés
language_invalid_str_mv Inglés
dc.relation.none.fl_str_mv Probus. 2014 May; 26(1): 59–82
info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/3PN/FFI2009-07648
info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ES/3PN/CSD2007-00012
dc.rights.none.fl_str_mv info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
eu_rights_str_mv openAccess
dc.format.none.fl_str_mv application/pdf
application/pdf
dc.publisher.none.fl_str_mv De Gruyter
publisher.none.fl_str_mv De Gruyter
dc.source.none.fl_str_mv reponame:Repositorio Digital de la UPF
instname:Universitat Pompeu Fabra
instname_str Universitat Pompeu Fabra
reponame_str Repositorio Digital de la UPF
collection Repositorio Digital de la UPF
repository.name.fl_str_mv
repository.mail.fl_str_mv
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