Typical acquisition by atypical children: Initial consonant cluster acquisition by Israeli Hebrew-acquiring children with cochlear implants

Abstract

This paper studies the developmental stages of word initial consonant clusters (CCs) in the speech of six monolingual Israeli Hebrew (IH) acquiring hearing impaired children using cochlear implant (CI). Focusing on the patterns of cluster reduction, this study compares the CI children with typically-developing hearing children. All the CI children, three boys and three girls with age ranged from 1;5–2;8 years at their first recording session, were with pre-lingual hearing impairment with bilateral sensorineural hearing loss. Productions of word initial CCs were elicited in an isolated-word picture-naming task combined with spontaneously produced words. Data collection started 2–4 months after implantation and continued until the correct production of word initial biconsonantal clusters. Results reveal that both the developmental stages and reduction patterns of word initial CCs of the CI children are very similar to typically-developing IH acquiring children, thus supporting earlier studies which show that children with CIs follow the same stages of acquisition as hearing children.

• word initial consonant clusters
• cochlear implant
• cluster acquisition
• cluster reduction
• Israeli-Hebrew
• phonological acquisition

Notes

1. In this paper the term markedness is based on Hayes and Steriade's (2004) hypothesis in which facts of articulatory and perceptual difficulty, mediated by speakers’ phonetic knowledge, are the ultimate source of phonological constraints and markedness laws. According to Hayes and Steriade (2004), the source of markedness constraints is the speaker's partial understanding of the physical conditions under which speech is produced and perceived.

2. See other approaches to cluster simplification, such as Phonology as Human Behavior (Tobin, 1997) and The Headness Approach (Goad and Rose, 2004).

3. We adopt the description of Laufer (1990; 1992), Bolozky (1997), and Bolozky and Kreitman (2007) that the IH r-sound is a dorsal (velar or uvular) approximant. To the best of our knowledge, there is no experimental evidence whether the IH r-sound is a liquid or a glide. In this paper, we treat it as a liquid, but further research is needed on this topic.

4. There were no obstruent-glide clusters in the target words in the studies on clusters typical acquisition in IH. Although this type of cluster elitists in IH (see Appendix A), it is very rare in young children's lexicon.

5. In these two examples, the second syllable is also the stressed one. However, since there are only few examples of reduplication in CI children, and since there was no effect of stress on reduplication in typical acquisition, evidence that stress affects reduplication is not conclusive.

6. There are no data on the acquisition of /w/ in IH, since it is not one of the IH consonants and it appears only in some loan words or in animal sounds, which children produce in their early stages of language acquisition.