Influence of consonant frequency on Icelandic-speaking children's speech acquisition

Abstract

Purpose: A developmental hierarchy of phonetic feature complexity has been proposed, suggesting that later emerging sounds have greater articulatory complexity than those learned earlier. The aim of this research was to explore this hierarchy in a relatively unexplored language, Icelandic.

Method: Twenty-eight typically-developing Icelandic-speaking children were tested at 2;4 and 3;4 years. Word-initial and word-medial phonemic inventories and a phonemic implicational hierarchy are described.

Result: The frequency of occurrence of Icelandic consonants in the speech of 2;4 and 3;4 year old children was, from most to least frequent, n, s, t, p, r, m, l, k, f, ʋ, j, ɵ, h, kʰ, c, , ɰ, pʰ, tʰ, cʰ, ç, , , .

Conclusion: Consonant frequency was a strong predictor of consonant accuracy at 2;4 months (r(23) = −0.75), but the effect was weaker at 3;4 months (r(23) = −0.51). Acquisition of /c/, // and /l/ occurred earlier, relative to English, Swedish, Dutch and German. A frequency-bound practice effect on emerging consonants is proposed to account for the early emergence of /c/, // and /l/ in Icelandic.

Keywords::

• Consonants
• acquisition
• segment development
• phonological development
• Icelandic

Acknowledgements

This study is based on the doctoral dissertation of the first author and was partly supported by The Icelandic Centre for Research (Rannís). We would like to thank the children and their families who participated in the study.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

Notes

^† Ambisyllabicity refers to when a medial consonant can simultaneously be regarded as the coda of one syllable and the onset of the next (Gussenhoven & Jacobs, 2005).