期刊名称：Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology
电子版ISSN：1868-6354
出版年度：2010
卷号：1
期号：2
页码：319-343
DOI：10.1515/labphon.2010.017
摘要：When they first begin to talk, children show characteristic consonant errors, which
are often described in terms that recall Neogrammarian sound change. For example, a Japanese child’s production of the word kimono might be transcribed
with an initial postalveolar affricate, as in typical velar-softening sound changes.
Broad-stroke reviews of errors list striking commonalities across children acquiring different languages, whereas quantitative studies reveal enormous variability
across children, some of which seems related to differences in consonant frequencies across different lexicons. This paper asks whether the appearance of commonalities across children acquiring different languages might be reconciled with the
observed variability by referring to the ways in which sound change might affect
frequencies in the lexicon. Correlational analyses were used to assess relationships between consonant accuracy in a database of recordings of toddlers acquiring Cantonese, English, Greek, or Japanese and two measures of consonant frequency: one specific to the lexicon being acquired, the other an average frequency
calculated for the other three languages. Results showed generally positive trends,
although the strength of the trends differed across measures and across languages.
Many outliers in plots depicting the relationships suggested historical contingencies
that have conspired to make for unexpected paths, much as in biological evolution.
