The role of the input frequency in L1 Spanish phonological acquisition. A corpus-based study

Marta Garrote Salazar

doi:10.3989/loquens.2022.e089

Authors

Marta Garrote Salazar Universidad Autónoma de Madrid https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5566-9073

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3989/loquens.2022.e089

Keywords:

L1 acquisition, phonological development, input frequency, corpus

Abstract

This study presents the phonological system exhibited by children (n=59) aged 3;0 to 6;0 and focuses on the role of input frequency. Using a spontaneous child speech corpus of Spanish (CHIEDE) as a data source, as well as computational processing techniques -including an automatic phonological transcriber-, data relating to the phonological level was retrieved. This resulted in a phonological inventory of Spanish-speaking children, ordered by frequency of use, which may serve as a model for research on typical and atypical child language development. Additionally, a study was carried out on the stability of the participants’ phonological systems by calculating the variability that the different age groups displayed, and outcomes were compared with other similar corpora. Results obtained from the comparison of the phonological inventory of children and adults show that there is a relationship between frequency of use in adult speech and the order of acquisition of phonemes.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Acevedo, M. A. (1993). Development of Spanish consonants in preschool children. Communication Disorders Quarterly, 15(2), 9-15.

Acosta, V., & Ramos, V. (1998). Estudio de los desórdenes del habla infantil desde la perspectiva de los procesos fonológicos. Revista de Logopedia, Fonatría y Audiología, 18, 124-142.

Albalá, M. J., & Marrero, V. (2004). Spanish Marrero Corpus. TalkBank. https://childes.talkbank.org/access/Spanish/Marrero.html

Benedet, M., & Snow, K. (2004). Spanish BecaCESNo Corpus. TalkBank. https://childes.talkbank.org/access/Spanish/BecaCESNo.html

Bernhardt, B. M., & Stemberger, J. P. (2017). Investigating typical and protracted phonological development across languages. In E. Babatsouli, D. Ingram, & N. Müller (Eds.), Crosslinguistic Encounters in Language Acquisition: Typical and Atypical Development (pp. 71-108). Multilingual Matters.

Bernstein-Ratner, N. (1994). Phonological analysis of child speech. In J. L. Sokolov, & C.E. Snow (Eds.), Handbook of research in language development using CHILDES (pp. 324-372). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Bleses, D., Basbøll, H., Lum, J., & Vach, W. (2010). Phonology and lexicon in a cross-linguistic perspective: the importance of phonetics - a commentary on Stoel-Gammon’s “Relationships between lexical and phonological development in young children”. Journal of Child Language ,38(01), 61-68.

Bosch, L. (1983). El desarrollo fonológico infantil: una prueba para su evaluación. Anuario de Psicología, 28(1), 87-114.

Bosch, L., & Sebastián-Gallés, N. (2001). Evidence of early language discrimination abilities in infants from bilingual environments. Infancy, 2, 29-49.

Bosch, L., & Sebastián-Gallés, N. (2003). Language experience and the perception of a voicing contrast in fricatives: infant and adult data. In M. J. Solé, D. Recasens, & J. Romero (Eds.), Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 1987-1990). Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona.

Bunta, F., & Ingram, D. (2007). The acquisition of speech rhythm by bilingual Spanish-and English-speaking 4-and 5-year-old children. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 50(4), 999-1014.

Carreira, M. (1991). The acquisition of Spanish syllable structure. In D. Wanner, & D. A. Kibbee (Eds.), New analyses in Romance linguistics (pp. 3-18). John Benjamins.

Chomsky, N. (1980). Rules and representation. MIT Press.

Demuth, K. (2009). The prosody of syllables, words and morphemes. In E. L. Bavin (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Child Language (pp. 183-198). Cambridge University Press.

Díez-Itza, E. (1995). Procesos fonológicos en la adquisición del español como lengua materna. In J. M. Ruiz, P. H. Sheerin, & E. González-Cascos (Eds.), Actas del XI Congreso Nacional de Lingüística Aplicada (pp. 225-264). Universidad de Valladolid.

Díez-Itza, E., & Martínez López, V. (2004). Las etapas tardías de la adquisición fonológica: procesos de reducción de grupos consonánticos. Anuario de Psicología, 35, 177-202.

Dolgova, N., & Tyler, A. (2019). Applications of Usage-Based Approaches to Language Teaching. In X. Gao (Ed.), Second Handbook of English Language Teaching (pp. 939-961). Springer.

Durgunoğlu, A. Y., & Öney, B. (1999). A cross-linguistic comparison of phonological awareness and word recognition. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 11, 281-299.

Ellis, N. C. (2008). Usage-based and form-focus SLA: The implicit and explicit learning of constructions. In A. Tyler, Y. Kim, & M. Takada (Eds.), Language in the Context of Use: Discourse and Cognitive Approaches to Language, (pp. 93-120). New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Ellis, N. C. (2017). Cognition, Corpora, and Computing: Triangulating Research in Usage-Based Language Learning. Language Learning, 67(S1), 40-65.

Garrote, M. (2010). Los corpus de habla infantil. Metodología y análisis. Servicio de publicaciones de la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.

Goldstein, B., & Cintrón, P. (2001). An investigation of phonological skills in Puerto-Rican Spanish-speaking 2-year-olds. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 15, 343-361.

Goodman, J. C., Dale, P. S., & Li, P. (2008). Does frequency count? Parental input and the acquisition of vocabulary. Journal of Child Language, 35, 515-531.

Grunwell, P. (1981). The development of phonology: A descriptive profile. First language, 3, 161-191.

Hedlund, G., & Rose, Y. (2020). Phon 3.1 [Computer Software]. https://phon.ca.

Ingram, D. (1976). Phonological disability in children. Edwards Arnold.

Ingram, D. (1979). Phonological patterns in the speech of young children. In P. Fletcher, & M. Garman (Eds.), Language acquisition (pp. 133-149). Cambridge University Press.

Ingram, D. (2002). The measurement of whole-word productions. Journal of Child Language, 29, 713-733.

Jimenez, B. C. (1987). Acquisition of Spanish consonants in children aged 3-5 years, 7 months. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 18(4), 357-363.

Kehoe, M., & Lleó, C. (2003). The acquisition of syllable types in monolingual and bilingual German and Spanish children. In B. Beachley, A. Brown, & F. Conlin (Eds.), Proceedings of the Twenty-seventh annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 402-413). Cascadilla Press.

Kehoe, M., & Lleó, C. (2005). The emergence of language specific rhythm in German-Spanish bilingual children. Arbeiten zur Mehrsprachigkeit: Working Papers in Multilingualism, 58. SFB 538.

Kehoe, M., Lleó, C., & Rakow, M. (2004). Voice onset time in bilingual German-Spanish children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 7, 71-88.

Kern, S., Gayraud, F., & Chenu, F. (2014). The role of input in early first language morphosyntactic development. Language, Interaction and Acquisition, 5(1), 1-18.

Kouti, M. (2010). Problemas perceptivos de la estructura silábica del español por aprendices griegos de E/LE. Revista electrónica de didáctica. Español lengua extranjera (redELE), 19, 19-36.

Lleó, C. (2002). The role of markedness in the acquisition of complex prosodic structures by German-Spanish Bilinguals. International Journal of Bilingualism, 6, 291-313.

Lleó, C. (2003). Prosodic licensing of coda in the acquisition of Spanish. Probus, 15, 257-281.

Lleó, C. (2006). The acquisition of prosodic word structures in Spanish by monolingual and Spanish-German bilingual children. Language and Speech, 49, 205-229.

Lleó, C. (2012). First language acquisition of Spanish sounds and prosody. In J. I. Hualde, A. Olarrea, & E. O’Rourke (Eds.), The Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics (pp. 693-710). Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

López Valero, A., Carrillo Hernández, M. R., & Ros Frutos, J. L. (1989). Aportaciones para el estudio del desarrollo del lenguaje infantil en el período comprendido entre los veinticuatro y los treinta meses. Cauce, Revista de Filología y su Didáctica, 12, 145-156.

MacWhinney, B. (1996). Computational analysis of interactions. In P. Fletcher, & B. MacWhinney (Eds.), The Handbook of child language (pp. 152-178). Blackwell.

MacWhinney, B., & Snow, C. (1985). The child language data exchange system. Journal of Child Language, 12(2), 271-295.

Maekawa, J., & Storkel, H. L. (2006). Individual differences in the influence of phonological characteristics on expressive vocabulary development by young children. Journal of Child Language, 33, 439-459.

Maratsos, M. P. (1974). Children who get worse at understanding the passive: A replication of Bever. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 3(1), 65-74.

Martínez Celdrán, E., Fernández Planas, A. M., & Carrera Sabaté, J. (2003). Castilian Spanish. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 33(2), 255-259.

McEnery, T., & Wilson, A. (2001). Corpus linguistics: An introduction. University Press.

McLeod, S., & Crowe, K. (2018). Children’s Consonant Acquisition in 27 Languages: A Cross-Linguistic Review. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 27(4), 1546-1571.

Melgar de González, M. (1976). Cómo detectar al niño con problemas de habla. Trillas.

Menn, L., & Stoel-Gammon, C. (1996). Phonological development. In P. Fletcher, & B. MacWhinney (Eds.), The Handbook of child language (pp. 335-359). Blackwell.

Mines, M. A., Hanson, B. F., & Shoup, J. E. (1978). Frequency of occurrence of phonemes in conversational English. Language and speech, 21(3), 221-241.

Moreno Cabrera, J. C. (1997). Introducción a la lingüística: enfoque tipológico y universalista. Síntesis.

Moreno Sandoval, A., Torre Toledano, D., De La Torre, R., Garrote, M., & Guirao, J. M. (2008). Developing a phonemic and syllabic frequency inventory for spontaneous spoken Castilian Spanish and their comparison to text-based inventories. Proceedings of the VI Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), 1097-1100.

Piaget, J. (1926). The language and thought of the child. Kegan Paul, Trench & Trubner.

Pierrehumbert, J. B. (2003). Probabilistic theories of phonology. In R. Bod, J. Hay, & S. Jannedy (Eds.), Probability Theory in Linguistics (pp. 177-228). The MIT Press.

Polo, N. (2016). La investigación actual sobre el desarrollo de la fonología del español como lengua materna. Lenguas modernas, 47, 137-152.

Pye, C. L., Ingram, D., & List, H. (1987). A comparison of initial consonant acquisition in English and Quiché. In K. Nelson, & A. Van Kleeck (Eds.), Children’s Language (Vol. 6) (pp. 175-190). Erlbaum.

Roark, B., & Demuth, K. (2000). Prosodic constraints and the learners’s environment: a corpus study. In Howell, S. Catherine, Sara A. Fish & Thea Keith-Lucas (Eds.). Proceedings of the 24th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Vol. 2 (pp. 597-608). Cascadilla Press.

Rose, Y. (2009). Internal and External Influences on Child Language Productions. In Pellegrino, François, Egidio Marsico, Ioana Chitoran, & Christophe Coupé (Eds.), Approaches to Phonological Complexity (pp. 329-351). Mouton de Gruyter.

Serra, M. (1983). Normas estadísticas de articulación para la población escolar de 3 a 7 años en el área metropolitana de Barcelona. Revista de Logopedia, Foniatría y Audiología, 3(4), 232-235.

Stampe, D. (1969). The acquisition of phonetic representation. In R. I. Binnick, A. Davidson, G. Green, & J. L. Morgan (Eds.), Papers from the Fifth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society (pp. 443-454). Chicago Linguistic Society.

Stoel-Gammon, C. (2006). Infancy: phonological development. Encyclopaedia of Language & Linguistics (Second Edition), 642-648.

Stoll, S. (2009). Crosslinguistic approaches to language acquisition. In E. L. Bavin (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Child Language (pp. 89-104). Cambridge University Press.

Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Harvard University Press.

Valian, V. (2009). Innateness and learnability. In E. Bavin, (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of language acquisition (pp. 15-34). Cambridge University Press.

Velleman, S. L., & Vihman, M. M. (2002). Whole-Word Phonology and Templates. Language Speech and Hearing Services in Schools, 33(1), 9-23 https://doi.org/10.1044/0161-1461(2002/002)

Vihman, M. M., DePaolis, R. A, & Keren-Portnoy, T. (2009). A dynamic systems approach to babbling and words. In E. L. Bavin (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Child Language (pp. 163-182). Cambridge University Press.

Vihman, M., & Wauquier, S. (2018). Templates in child language. In M. Hickmann, E, Veneziano, & H. Jisa (Eds.), Sources of variation in first language acquisition: Languages, contexts, and learners (pp. 27-44). John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Zamuner, T. (2009). The structure and nature of phonological neighbourhoods in children’s early lexicons. Journal of Child Language, 36, 3-21.

Zamuner, T., LouAnn, S., & Gerken y Hammond, M. (2004). Phonotactic probabilities in young children’s speech production. Journal of Child Language 31, 515-36.