The typological frequency of consonants is highly predictive of their order of acquisition in English

Bibliographic Data

ID21714493
AuthorsCaleb Everett (0000-0002-5889-3935, University of Miami , Coral Gables , USA, corresponding author), Sophie Schwartz (0000-0001-7718-4053, The George Washington University , Washington , USA)
Year2023
Volume27
Issue2
Pages537-552
Publication date2023-07-26
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueLinguistic Typology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1430-0532 • E-ISSN: 1613-415X
PublisherWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/lingty-2022-0033
OpenAlexW4321498343
LanguageEN
References cited30

The order of acquisition of consonants by children is impacted by both language-specific and species-wide factors. The latter factors also help to motivate the crosslinguistic commonness of some consonants. Here we explore the extent of overlap between crosslinguistic commonness and order of acquisition. We test how well the typological commonness of consonants is predictive of their order of acquisition in English, and vice versa, helping to shed light on the extent to which general cognitive and physical factors are explanatory vis-à-vis the acquisition of specific consonant types. We utilize several different sources to demonstrate that typological frequency and order of acquisition are indeed highly mutually predictive. We rely on acquisition data from English. We demonstrate that the crosslinguistic usage of a consonant is a better predictor of its order of acquisition than the language-specific factors tested

Age of Acquisition · Cognition · Consonant · Language acquisition · Linguistics · Mathematics education · Second-language acquisition · Speech recognition · Computer Science · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Phonetics and Phonology Research · Psychology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

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