Cluster Development and the Veiled Rise in Sonority

Abstract

Children’s consonant cluster productions in typical and atypical phonological development were investigated for different languages reporting developmental productions that are universal, language-specific, and/or child-specific. These patterns are often interpreted considering sonority hierarchy effects. Quantitative norms on developmental cluster productions are less prevalent in the literature cross-linguistically, as are investigations on the development of less frequent cluster types in the world’s languages, like those involving falling and level sonority two-member onsets. Our study contributes to these investigations, focusing on Greek-specific onsets: falling sonority obstruents [ft, xt], level sonority obstruents [fθ, fç, ðʝ, xθ, ɣð], and level sonority nasals [mɲ]. We present cross-sectional, longitudinal data from 90 monolingual children, aged 2;0–4;0, based on the word elicitation task, Phonological Assessment for Greek (PAel). As only [ft] 89%, [fç] 80%, [mɲ] 88% are acquired by 3;6–4;0, the data provide evidence that [ft, xt, fθ, xθ, ɣð] reduce to C2, [mɲ] reduces to C1, and [fç], [ðʝ] show the most variability in reduction/simplification patterns. Reduction patterns largely reflect individual cluster acquisition paths longitudinally; the relative reduction to a member changes with age, but the preference to the member does not, except for [ðʝ]. The data facilitate the establishment of quantitative markers for cluster development and qualitative interpretations in terms of featural and structural prominence, including a veiled sonority effect not previously reported in the literature.

Keywords

• clusters
• simplification
• production patterns
• falling and level sonority
• Greek