Abstract
This study investigates the development of English two member onset #sC clusters in Haitian Creole-English bilingual children. The subjects are 40 Haitian Creole-English bilingual children, between the ages of 3;1 – 4;11. The fundamental question is whether sonority can account for any subgrouping of #sC clusters in phonological development, and if not, to determine what the governing patterns are in subjects renditions. Results were examined in terms of correct and incorrect renditions, implicational relationships, possible groupings according to the quality of C2, as well as comparisons to productions from monolingual English speaking children. Sonority sequencing is found to be relevant in most productions and the reduction patterns were in accordance with the predictions of the ‘factorial typology’ and the ‘headedness framework’.
Notes
1 In this paper, we adopt the following ten point scale of sonority from Hogg and McCully (1987).