Phonology in Protolanguage and Interlanguage - Elena Babatsouli

Phonology in Protolanguage and Interlanguage - Elena Babatsouli

4. Acquired Singleton Fricatives and Lateral in Cluster Development: A Bilingual Child Case

Phonology in Protolanguage and Interlanguage - Elena Babatsouli

Elena Babatsouli [+-]
Institute of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech
Elena Babatsouli is the Director of the Institute of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech in Chania, Greece, whose purpose is the advancement and dissemination of scientific knowledge in various aspects of language acquisition, typical and atypical. She received a BA in English from Royal Holloway, University of London, a MA in Languages and Business from London South Bank University and her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Crete. Her research interests are in the acquisition, use and loss of language in all its forms (first, second, bilingual, dialectal), and in clinical implications. She was co-chair of the inaugural International Symposium of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech 2015 and co-editor of its Proceedings.

Description

The chapter investigates the acquisition of fricative-lateral consonant clusters in child developmental speech longitudinally with a focus on clusters whose members have been acquired in singleton contexts. Specifically, the study investigates patterns in the acquisition of labial fricatives (C1) clustering with the alveolar lateral (C2), i.e. /fl, vl/, at syllable onsets in a bilingual child’s speech in Greek and English across the span of 17 months of her phonological development, starting at age 2;7. Comparisons with the child’s /sl/ in English are included where pertinent, since /sl/ is the only other targeted cluster in the child’s bilingualism satisfying the research criterion. Dense, longitudinal data on the child’s naturalistic cluster production were elicited during daily interaction with the author, who entered the child’s full utterances orthographically and phonetically in CLAN (MacWhinney 2000). The study provides a fresh insight into developmental speech by investigating cluster acquisition in detailed data longitudinally, re-examining developmental stages, paths, and processes under the new perspective considered, and utilizing the single-subject methodology in bilingualism to investigate production disparity that emanates from differences in phonotactic distributions in the languages studied. The study reveals that known stages and processes in cluster development are not challenged by the new criterion, though still shown to be tempered by idiosyncratic tendencies. The acquisition level of singletons in the targeted contexts plays a role that is both facilitative and obsolete in the process of cluster acquisition. Furthermore, a propensity towards non-targeted complexity and markedness in the child’s speech is evidenced alongside the known tendency towards simplified productions.

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Citation

Babatsouli, Elena. 4. Acquired Singleton Fricatives and Lateral in Cluster Development: A Bilingual Child Case. Phonology in Protolanguage and Interlanguage. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 109-138 Jan 2018. ISBN 9781781795644. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=31676. Date accessed: 08 Oct 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.31676. Jan 2018

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