Language-Specific Influence on Phoneme Development: French and Drehu Data

This study extends a cross-linguistic collaboration on phonological development, which aims at comparing production of word-initial sequences of consonant-vowel (CVs) across sets of languages which have comparable phonemes that differ in overall frequency or in the frequency with which they occur in analogous sound sequences. By comparing across languages, the influence of language-specific distributional patterns on phoneme mastery can be disentangled from the effects of more general phonetic constraints on development. We made word and non-word repetition experiments with French- and Drehu-acquiring two-year-old to five-year-old children. We first analysed production in words according to frequency data in French and Drehu. Results show that productions of word-initial consonants are correlated with their frequencies, especially in younger children. Then we compared the non-word production scores of French- and Drehu-acquiring children. French and Drehu learners have similar mean scores but show different patterns for specific phonemes that differ in frequency.