Mom, Dad, and Ball: Manner of Articulation Sequences Within Children's Consonant-Vowel-Consonant Words

Previous studies of early speech acquisition have established characteristics of phonemes and syllable structures produced by young children. Fewer studies compared patterns in children's within-word phoneme sequences of the target words with their actual productions. Additionally, studies of consonant sequences are more frequently focused on place of articulation than manner of articulation. This study aims to investigate consonant sequences in manner of articulation within children's actual productions as well as their target sequences.

The data were taken from a larger longitudinal study in the English Davis corpus. Consonant sequences in 3,328 tokens of consonant-vowel-consonant (C₁VC₂) target word forms from 18 children were analyzed. The data for this study were taken from sessions when the children produced one word at a time (ages range from 0;10 to 2;0 [years;months]). Phoneme sequences within the children's target words and their actual productions of those words were compared to examine consonant manner of articulation in first (C₁) and second (C₂) consonants.

Approximately 50% of C₁VC₂ target words contained repeated manner sequences (e.g., stop-stop, dog; nasal-nasal, mine). The other 50% contained variegated manner sequences (e.g., stop-nasal, down, done). When target words contained repeated manner sequences (e.g., stop-stop), children's actual productions matched the target sequence more frequently than when the target words contained variegated sequences (e.g., stop-nasal).

Results showed that word-level characteristics (i.e., repeated or variegated sequence) in target words are important for children's success in matching their production to their target sequences during the early period of speech and language development. The same pattern was previously observed for consonant place sequences in C₁VC₂ words and place and manner sequences in consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel words.