Coda consonant production in French-speaking children

ABSTRACT

This study examined coda production in French-speaking children, aged 2;6 to 6;10 (n = 141). The primary aim was to provide normative information on coda production with a large group of children. The secondary aim was to investigate factors which influence coda production such as age, manner and place of articulation, word length, word position, and bilingualism. Children took part in a word-naming task in which they produced words containing word-final and -medial codas. Results indicated that French-speaking children, as young as 2;6, produce word-final codas with a high degree of accuracy (i.e. 80%). Age had minimal effects on coda presence (i.e., whether a coda was realized or not) but it did influence coda accuracy (i.e. whether a coda was realized target-like). Older children had better coda accuracy scores than younger children. Manner of articulation influenced coda production: the younger children had the lowest scores for liquid and fricative codas whereas the older children, for fricative codas. A closer examination of coda production according to voicing revealed it was voiced obstruent codas which obtained low accuracy scores across age groups. Word-length influenced coda realization with the youngest age group producing codas more often in one- versus two-syllable words. Children produced codas more often in word-final versus word-medial position with the greatest differences evident in the youngest children. Bilinguals obtained better coda scores than monolinguals at the youngest ages and poorer ones at the oldest ages. The study concludes with a discussion of the clinical implications of the findings.

KEYWORDS:

• French
• codas
• child speech
• bilingualism

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Mélanie Havy, Kopika Kannathasan, Anne-Laure Bouchut, Chloe Girardier, Audrey Burkhardt, Constance Terrail, and Tanya Bella Bancaleiro for their help in testing the children and/or transcribing the data. In addition, we would like to thank the personnel and teachers at “EVE Espèces de Vie Enfantine du secteur université” and in the Genevan public school system for their collaboration in the recruitment of children.

Statement of interest

The author reports no conflicts of interest.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

¹ By sonority/manner of articulation, we refer to the distinction obstruent versus sonorant or to differences among the manner class (stop, fricative, nasal, liquid, glide).

1.5. A careful examination of words in the IFDC (Kern & Gayraud, 2010) and DLPF version 3 (Bassano et al., 2005) shows that /r/ is the most frequent word-medial coda followed by /s/.

³ We employed different criteria for designating a child as bilingual in Group 3 to 6 as compared to Group 2;6 (30% vs. 20%). This was because we did not conduct interviews with the parents of the older children and, thus, employed a stricter criteria to ensure that the children were bilingual.

⁴ This child had similar results to the other bilingual children, who have received language exposure before 3;0 suggesting that the slightly later age of acquisition did not influence phonological production.

⁵ One problem with the analyses of place of articulation is that final /k, g/ were not sampled in the data set. Thus, the only phoneme with “dorsal” place of articulation was the rhotic [ʁ].

⁶ Children also produced four syllable words but since this category included the word helicopter only, we did not include it.

⁷ Epenthesis was not very frequent but occasionally present in the productions of the 2;6 group (15 examples of which 7 were for /b/ and /d/ codas; [kybə] for cube).