Phonological Universals in Early Childhood: Evidence from Sonority Restrictions

Abstract

Across languages, onsets with large sonority distances are preferred to those with smaller distances (e.g., bw>bd>lb; Greenberg 1978). Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 2004) attributes such facts to grammatical restrictions that are universally active in all grammars. To test this hypothesis, here we examine whether children extend putatively universal sonority restrictions to onsets unattested in their language. Participants (M = 4;03) were presented with pairs of auditory words—either identical (e.g., lbif⇉lbif) or epenthetically related (e.g., lbif⇉lebif)—and asked to judge their identity. Results showed that, like adults, children's ability to detect epenthetic distortions was monotonically related to sonority distance (bw>bd>lb), and their performance was inexplicable by several statistical and phonetic factors. These findings suggest that sonority restrictions are active in early childhood, and their scope is broad.

Notes

¹Information on second-language experience was available for 12 of the 18 participants. Nine participants spoke exclusively English at home, and the remaining 3 were all exposed to languages whose onset structure is either comparable to or less marked than English (i.e., Spanish, German).

²The minimum criterion in the rise-fall comparison was set to 50%, as all practice items were unattested. It soon became evident that some of the children did not understand the task because of the use of nonwords, and for this reason, subsequent testing of the rise-plateau and plateau-fall comparisons replaced two of the practice trials with existing words (e.g., please-police; blow-below) and elevated the cutoff criterion to 75% correct (across the four trials)

³In view of the large variability in participants' age, we gauged the effect of age by performing a median split. An inspection of the means suggested that performance was similar for younger (M = 3;10) and older (M = 4;10) participants. Marked onsets yielded more accurate responses compared to less marked ones for both younger (M = 35.69%, M = 20.83%, for unmarked and marked onsets, respectively) and older children (M = 42.36%, M = 21.92%, for unmarked and marked onsets, respectively)

⁴Interestingly, the identification of any given onset type was modulated by its experimental context. Sonority falls, for example, yielded higher accuracy when they were mixed with sonority rises (M = 25.00%) relative to their mixing with sonority plateaus (M = 2.08%). Similarly, sonority plateaus were more readily discriminated from their disyllabic counterparts in the context of sonority rises (M = 35.42%) compared to sonority falls (M = 8.33%). These findings suggest that discrimination accuracy was determined not only by the absolute markedness of the cluster but also by its markedness relative to the other structures presented in the experimental list. As the overall markedness of the list increased, misidentification was more prevalent, and consequently, children were more likely to treat monosyllables as identical to their epenthetic counterparts. The effect of relative markedness presents a special case of list-context effects, which have been amply documented in the psycholinguistic literature (e.g., Stone & Van Orden 1993).

⁵The duration of the burst for sonority rise items was M = 10.57 ms (range: 5.22–17.05 ms); for sonority plateaus, it was M = 10.32 ms (range: 3.86–27.58 ms). In the non-homorganic items, burst duration for items of rising and level sonority, respectively, were M = 13.69 ms (range: 8–17.5 ms); M = 10.32 ms (range: 3.86–27.58 ms).