How the young French child avoids the pre-voicing problem for word-initial voiced stops

Abstract

Macken & Barton (1980) noted an asymmetry in their young Spanish-learning children's word-initial stop productions, as compared with English-learning children's, namely, ‘the Spanish-learning children acquire “lead” voicing…after age four’, whereas ‘English-learning children acquire “long lag” stops…by about 2;6’. ‘One possible explanation’, they propose, ‘is that lead voicing is inherently difficult to produce or at least more difficult to learn than long lag…’. The purpose of this Note is to present data suggesting that young children learning French, which also employs phonetically pre-voiced stops for its phonemically voiced category, also show an asymmetry in their word-initial stop productions. Furthermore, this asymmetry supports the notion, proposed by Macken & Barton, that lead voicing is somehow ‘more difficult’ for these young children to learn to produce. However, the actual ‘strategy’ used by the French-learning children to circumvent this presumed difficulty is different from that used by Macken & Barton's Spanish-learning children. This difference supports the notion that children have a certain degree of latitude in finding their way through the maze of psycholinguistic development (Kiparsky & Menn 1977).