Phonotactics and morphophonology in early child language: Evidence from Dutch

This research investigates children’s knowledge of how surface pronunciations of lexical items vary according to their phonological and morphological context. Dutch-learning children aged 2.5 and 3.5 years were tested on voicing neutralization and morphophonological alternations. For instance, voicing does not alternate between the pair [pɛt]∼[pɛtən] (cap∼caps) but does in [bɛt]∼[bɛdən] (bed∼beds). Data from the first experiment showed that children at a younger age were less accurate at imitating words with /d/ than /t/, regardless of morphological context. In a second study, children between 2 and 4 years were asked to produce singulars from novel plurals (e.g., [kɛtən]∼[kɛt] and [kɛdən]∼[kɛt]). Results indicated that children’s performance was better in contexts that did not require surface variation. Dutch-learning children are not able to robustly generalize their knowledge of phonotactics and morphophonological alternations. Rather, it appears that their knowledge is more concrete, in line with recent usage-based theories of acquisition. The majority of studies on phonological development have focused on children’s acquisition of segmental inventories and the development of phonological and lexical representations. Although work has examined the acquisition of phonotactics (Coady & Evans, 2008) and the acquisition of morphology (Voeikova & Dressler, 2006), a relatively unexplored area in phonological development is the interface between phonotactics and morphology. Specifically, phonotactic restrictions in a language are often linked to phonological processes, which can result in morphophonological alternations (see below for examples). The interface © Cambridge University Press 2011 0142-7164/11 $15.00 Applied Psycholinguistics 33:3 482 Zamuner et al.: Phonotactic and morphophonological acquisition between phonotactics and morphophonology reflects higher cognitive levels of phonological structure, which are developing until at least 6 years of age (Pierrehumbert, 2003, 2006). Studying the interaction of these two domains provides insight into children’s knowledge of how sound structures relate to morphological structures in the lexicon. Despite this, very few studies have looked at how children acquire phonotactics and morphophonology. In this research, we investigate the developmental patterns for Dutch children’s acquisition of phonotactics and morphophonological alternations. Phonotactics refers to the legal sequencing of sounds within a given language. For example, in Dutch, voiceless and voiced obstruents can occur both wordinitially and word-medially (1a and b). In word-final position, voiced obstruents are phonotactically illegal (1c). The word pet is produced as [pɛt], and the word bed is produced as [bɛt], with a final /t/ rather than with a final /d/.1