An Articulatory Phonology Account of Preferred Consonant-Vowel Combinations

Abstract

Certain consonant/vowel combinations (labial/central, coronal/front, velar/back) are more frequent in babbling as well as, to a lesser extent, in adult language than chance would dictate. The “Frame then Content” (F/C) hypothesis (Davis & MacNeilage, 1994) attributes this pattern to biomechanical vocal-tract biases that change as infants mature. Articulatory Phonology (AP; Browman & Goldstein, 1989) attributes preferences to demands placed on shared articulators. F/C implies that preferences will diminish as articulatory control increases, while AP does not. Here, babbling from children at 6, 9, and 12 months in English, French, and Mandarin environments was examined. There was no developmental trend in CV preferences, although older ages exhibited greater articulatory control. A perception test showed no evidence of bias toward hearing the preferred combinations. Modeling using articulatory synthesis found limited support for F/C but more for AP, including data not originally encompassed in F/C. AP thus provides an alternative biomechanical explanation.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work was supported by NIH grants DC-000403 and DC-002717 to Haskins Laboratories. Portions of this work appeared in an unpublished Ph.D. dissertation (Giulivi, 2007). We thank Carol A. Fowler, Michael Studdert-Kennedy, Julia Irwin, Aude Noiray, D. Kimbrough Oller, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. Data for calculating percentages of preferred response from previous studies were kindly provided by Barbara L. Davis and Peter MacNeilage.

Notes

¹Further validation of transcriptions was provided through a two alternative forced choice identification test, conducted to determine whether listeners from two language backgrounds would agree not only with the transcriptions used in the present study, but also with acoustic indications of consonant and vowel identity. The aim was to understand whether there is an intrinsic bias towards hearing the favored CV combinations or not. Participants were two groups of native American-English speakers and two groups of native Italian speakers, who where asked to listen to four different kinds of CV syllables (labial-central, coronal-front, labial-front and labial-central), and judge the place of articulation of consonants and vowels.

A repeated measures ANOVA was performed on the results of both the consonant and the vowel test. The between factor was Language (English or Italian) and the within factors were Consonant and Vowel. The dependent variable was the percent of responses that agreed with the transcriber's judgment.

Overall the test showed good agreement both with the transcriptions considered for the present study and with the acoustic indications of sound identity (even if vowels were not as accurately identified as the consonants). No noticeable tendency towards hearing the preferred CV combinations was observed.

²The acoustic results of Serkhane et al. (2007) show some correspondences with those of Sussman et al. (1999). In this study, the authors recorded a child from 7 to 40 months of age. They found that CV coarticulation, as indicated by locus equations, grew increasingly adult-like between 7 and 13 months.