The acquisition of consonants in Québécois French: A cross-sectional study of pre-school aged children

Abstract

This study provides a systematic description of French consonant acquisition in a large cohort of pre-school aged children: 156 children aged 20–53 months participated in a picture-naming task. Five analyses were conducted to study consonant acquisition: (1) consonant inventory, (2) consonant accuracy, (3) consonant acquisition, (4) a comparison of consonant inventory to consonant acquisition, and (5) a comparison to English cross-sectional data. Results revealed that more consonants emerge at an earlier age in word initial position, followed by medial position, and then word final position. Consonant accuracy underwent the greatest changes before the age of 36 months, and achieved a relative plateau towards 42 months. The acquisition of consonants revealed that four early consonants were acquired before the age of 36 months (i.e., /t, m, n, z/); 12 intermediate consonants were acquired between 36 and 53 months (i.e., /p, b, d, k, , ν, f, v, , l, w, ч/); and four consonants were acquired after 53 months (/s, з, ∫, j/). In comparison to English data, language specific patterns emerged that influence the order and pace of phonological acquisition. These findings highlight the important role of language specific developmental data in understanding the course of consonant acquisition.

Keywords:

• Phonology
• typical development
• speech acquisition

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Canadian Language and Literacy Research Network. We wish to express our appreciation to the participants and their families who generously agreed to take part in this study. We extend our thanks to Chantal Desmarais, Amy Glaspey, Carol Stoel-Gammon, and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback on early drafts of this manuscript.