Conxita Lleó

Event-related brain responses to morphological violations in Catalan.

The ERP (event-related potential) violation paradigm was used to investigate brain responses to morphologically correct and incorrect verb forms of Catalan. Violations of stem formation and inflectional processes were examined in separate experimental conditions. Our most interesting finding is that misapplications of stem formation rules elicit an early left preponderant negativity. This complements our previous ERP results on morphological violations in other languages in which misapplications of inflectional rules were shown to produce such effects. We make use of the linguistic distinction between lexically stored and rule-based word forms and suggest a unified interpretation of the experimental results, arguing that these negativities vary as a function of processes involved in morpho-syntactic structure building.

Consonant clusters in child phonology and the directionality of syllable structure assignment

The production of target consonant clusters at early stages of acquisition is analysed from a phonological representational perspective. The data stem from five normal monolingual German and four normal monolingual Spanish children at ages from 0;9 to 2;1, observed in naturalistic settings. At the beginning stages, target clusters are reduced to a single consonantal position, due to lack of branching of the syllabic constituents. This finding coincides with other results in the literature, which have in general been explained by means of universal principles. Nevertheless, there is an essential difference between the German and the Spanish data: German children tend to prefer the first consonant and Spanish children the second one. This difference can only be explained in terms of parameterization of syllabification, which in German takes place from left to right and in Spanish from right to left. At later stages, when clusters begin to be produced with two consonantal positions, they offer evidence for the beginning of branching of syllabic constituents, due to parameterization, and for the chronological order of the setting of the subsyllabic parameters. Our data offer evidence in favour of the following acquisitional hierarchy: CV > CVC > CVCC > CCVCC.

Voice onset time in bilingual German-Spanish children

This study examines the acquisition of the voicing contrast in German-Spanish bilingual children, on the basis of the acoustic measurement of Voice Onset Time (VOT). VOT in four bilingual children (aged 2;0–3;0) was measured and compared to VOT in three monolingual German children (aged 1;9–2;6), and to previous literature findings in Spanish. All measurements were based on word-initial stops extracted from naturalistic speech recordings. Results revealed that the bilingual children displayed three different patterns of VOT development: 1. Delay in the phonetic realization of voicing: two bilingual children did not acquire long lag stops in German during the testing period; 2. Transfer of voicing features: one child produced German voiced stops with lead voicing and Spanish voiceless stops with long lag voicing; and 3. No cross-language influence in the phonetic realization of voicing. The relevance of the findings for cross-linguistic interaction in bilingual phonetic/phonological development is discussed.

The role of markedness in the acquisition of complex prosodic structures by German-Spanish bilinguals

A tendency to limit prosodic words(PW) to the size of a metrical foot has often been acknowledged in early stages of acquisition and truncation has been shown to accomplish this size constraint. Interestingly, after the onefoot stage, children acquiring English or Dutch tend to enlargetheir productions by one foot, whereas at least for children acquiring Spanish, a stage, in which PWs comprise a foot preceded by an unfooted syllable, immediately follows the one-foot stage. Early productions(between 1;5 and 2;2/2;4) of children acquiring German and Spanish in monolingual and bilingual conditions constitute the empirical basis for this paper. The monolingual cross-linguistic results show quantitative differences between the truncation of the Spanishand German-speaking children and different ways in which these two groups of children overcome the size restriction and acquire complex words. These differences are accounted for within Optimality Theory, couched in Metrical Phonology, by means of two different grammars, that is, two different constraint hierarchies. The emergence of these different grammars is relevant for the analysis of the transition to complex prosodic structures in bilinguals and for the analysis of the relationships between their two phonological modules. An interaction of the two languages is found, the outcome of which is mainly attributed to markedness.

The Acquisition of Prosodic Word Structures in Spanish by Monolingual and Spanish-German Bilingual Children

This article examines the constraints on Prosodic Word production in Spanish by three monolingual and three Spanish-German bilingual children from the beginning of word production until 2;2. It also considers the relationship between Prosodic Words and Phonological Phrases, and in the case of monosyllabic words, it takes into consideration syllable structure (i.e., presence or absence of codas), in order to ascertain the importance of foot binarity in early child speech. Although the preferred Prosodic Word shape is that of a trochee, there appear a few monosyllables, consisting of CVC (or CV), which are produced earlier by the bilinguals than by the monolinguals. The minimality constraint is violated by the production of CV forms. Maximality constraints are observed for a very short time, as unfooted syllables appear very soon, especially in the data of the monolinguals. However, it takes several more months until Spanish children are able to produce Prosodic Words containing two feet, whereas Phonological Phrases constituted by two disyllabic Prosodic Words are produced earlier by some children. It is proposed that such data can be optimally treated by means of constraints, and their relevance to the question of whether prosodic structure is acquired bottom-up is briefly discussed.

The structure of branching onsets and rising diphthongs: evidence from the acquisition of French and Spanish

Abstract Consonant-glide-vowel (CGV) sequences are represented differently across languages. In some languages, the CG sequence is represented as a branching onset; in other languages, the GV sequence is represented as a rising diphthong. Given variable syllabification across languages, this study examines how young children represent CGV sequences. In particular, we evaluate Roses (2000) proposal, based on French acquisition data, that CGV sequences are initially represented as rising diphthongs. To do this, we examined childrens acquisition of CGV sequences in cross-sectional data from 14 French-speaking children (aged 1;10–2;10 years) and longitudinal data from five Spanish-speaking children (aged 1;3–3;0 years). Across several different measures (order of acquisition, style of acquisition, positional faithfulness, error patterns), childrens production of rising diphthongs and branching onsets patterned similarly. The results suggest that at least for these children, CGV sequences are represented as branching onsets during the early stages of acquisition.

Learning new segments and reducing domains in German L2 phonology: The role of the Prosodic Hierarchy:

This paper investigates interactions between the prosodic structures of L1 and L2 in second language acquisition. We focus here on a case in which the L1 and L2 are quite different with regard to the role played by the prosodic structures: the acquisition of German by speakers of Spanish. “Demarcating languages” such as German tend to phonologically mark the beginnings and/ or ends of relatively small prosodic constituents, while “Grouping languages” such as Spanish tend to favor the application of phonological phenomena throughout relatively long constituents. The subset-superset relationship inherent in current views of L2 acquisition, in particular the Asymmetry Hypothesis, predicts that reducing the domain of application of a process should be impossible to learn. In this light, we examine data (spontaneous and read speech of 11 Spanish speakers learning German) involving phonological processes which differ both in their segmental content and in their domains of application in the two languages. Our results are different from those predicted, that is, the pattern of acquisition cuts across the categories that would be established in such framework. Our findings thus demonstrate that the Asymmetry Hypothesis cannot be maintained as a model of L2 phonological acquisition, at least in its present form.

The acquisition of nuclei: a longitudinal analysis of phonological vowel length in three German-speaking children

Studies of vowel length acquisition indicate an initial stage in which phonological vowel length is random followed by a stage in which either long vowels (without codas) or short vowels and codas are produced. To determine whether this sequence of acquisition applies to a group of German-speaking children (three children aged 1;3-2;6), monosyllabic and disyllabic words were transcribed and acoustically analysed. The results did not support a stage in which vowel length was totally random. At the first time period (onset of word production to 1;7), one childs monosyllabic productions were governed by a bipositional constraint such that either long vowels, or short vowels and codas were produced. At the second (1;10 to 2;0) and third time periods (2;3 to 2;6), all three children produced target long vowels significantly longer than target short vowels. Transcription results indicated that children experienced more difficulty producing target long than short vowels. In the discussion, the findings are interpreted in terms of the representation of vowel length in childrens grammars.

Intervocalic consonants in the acquisition of German: onsets, codas or something else?

This study examines the behaviour of five phonemes /f, P, ts, k, l/ in word-initial, word-final, and intervocalic positions in the productions of five German-speaking children (age 1;3 to 3;3 years) in order to determine the patterning of those intervocalic consonants - do they behave more like onsets or codas? The study also contrasts the behaviour of intervocalic consonants after short versus long vowels in view of the stance taken in the theoretical literature that intervocalic consonants after short vowels are ambisyllabic but not after long vowels. Findings show that out of 25 conditions (5 phonemes 2 5 children), nine yield support for the patterning of intervocalic consonants as codas, two as onsets, and five as unique (neither coda nor onset). Three conditions yield support for the dual patterning of intervocalic consonants. In all other conditions, there was insufficient information to support their patterning with codas or with onsets. Results provide minimal support for different patterns of intervocalic consonants after short and long vowels; however, the lengthening and insertion of consonants after short vowels suggest that children are aware of the different phonological roles of intervocalic consonants after short and long vowels.

Homonymy and Reduplication: On the Extended Availability of Two Strategies in Phonological Acquisition.

In the literature on phonological acquisition certain strategies such as homonymy and reduplication are viewed as phenomena appearing at a very early age, resulting from a deficient sound-inventory and sound-distribution. Data on homonymy and reduplication from a longitudinal study will be considered, which show that: (a) such strategies can appear later in the childs linguistic development than it has been proposed; (b) the lexical item has to be considered a central unit, beyond the earliest stages, in the acquisition of phonology.