Acquisition of consonants among typically developing Akan-speaking children: A preliminary report

Abstract

Purpose

Although Akan is one of the most widely spoken indigenous languages in Ghana, very little is known about children’s phonological development. This paper investigates the development of consonants in Akan among typically developing children aged 3–5 years.

Method

A list of 103 Akan words was compiled, sampling the full range of prosodic structures, sound positions, features and segments, and controlling for word familiarity. A native Akan speaker audio-recorded the 103 single-word productions from each of nine typically developing children aged 3–5 years. The child productions were transcribed and analysed following procedures used in a larger cross-linguistic study. The current study presents results on the acquisition of consonants across the various ages.

Result

Preliminary results indicate that most consonants in Akan are mastered by age 4 or 5, similar to reports for other languages, although /w/ and /l/ showed late mastery, contrary to cross-linguistic observations. The rhotic /ɹ/ and consonants with secondary articulation were still developing at age 4 and showing a variety of mismatch patterns across children.

Conclusion

The findings provide preliminary information for developmentalists and speech-language pathologists on typical phonological development in Akan and contribute to a growing database on language acquisition in Niger-Congo languages.

Keywords:

• Akan
• Niger-Congo languages
• phonological development
• consonant acquisition
• typical development

Acknowledgements

This paper is based on an MA thesis titled “Assessing phonological development among Akan-speaking children” written by the first author under the supervision of the co-authors. All data presented here are part of the data presented in this thesis. Thanks to Mr. Kenneth Boadu, a trained primary school teacher with experience in data collection and annotation, who helped recruit and test all child participants. Thanks to all children who participated in this study, and to their families who provided consent.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplemental material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/17549507.2020.1825804.

Notes

1 This paper does not include an analysis of the effects of word length and syllable shapes due to page limitations: see Amoako (2020) for an in-depth discussion.