Fine-grained Phonetics and Acquisition of Greek Voiced Stops

We explore the acoustics of Greek voiced stops produced by 2and 3year-old Greek-acquiring children and compare them with adult patterns, in order to understand developmental universals in the mastery of phonation-type contrast. A truly voiced stop (i.e., one realized with voicing onset before the burst), is a difficult sound because the buildup of supralaryngeal air pressure during stop closure conflicts with aerodynamic requirements of the glottal gesture. Prior studies show that young language learners of French, Thai or Spanish are hindered by this fact, not mastering the voiced stops of these languages until age 4 or 5 [1, 4, 8]. In order to assess the effects of such physical constraints on language acquisition, we examine the acoustics of Greek voiced stops and investigate how Greek learners deal with the articulatory difficulty of producing voiced stops. Word-initial Greek voiced stop productions were recorded in two sets of experiments and were analyzed in terms of amplitude change during the closure and around the burst. We discuss how the languagespecific phonetic properties of Greek voiced stops affect the acquisition of them in Greek-speaking children. Our results suggest that the very detailed phonetic descriptions of phonetic categories must be counted to provide properly nuanced prediction about developmental universals.