Child Consonant Harmony Revisited: The Role of Lexical Memory Constraints and Segment Repetition.
Mitsuhiko Ota
PMID 39624848WHAT IT FOUND
Children producing words with different consonants often repeat the same consonant rather than just matching place.
This suggests child consonant harmony is driven by memory constraints during word learning, not just articulatory simplification.
Key findings
01In cross-linguistic data, the majority of assimilated forms in CVCV(C) targets showed agreement in both place and manner (identical consonants) rather than place only.
02Longitudinal English data confirmed that for CVCV(C) targets, place-and-manner agreement was more likely than place-only agreement, particularly before age 2.
03For CVC targets, the analysis did not find robust evidence that place-and-manner agreement was more common than place-only agreement.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study relied entirely on transcribed data, which is subject to listener bias and may overlook non-phonemic variations in children's speech. The cross-linguistic dataset was limited to a single recording session per child, capturing only a snapshot of development. The analysis of CVC targets was underpowered due to the rarity of agreement instances in those structures. The study did not include acoustic or ultrasound analysis to verify the actual articulatory movements behind the transcriptions.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the lack of significant findings for CVC targets as evidence that consonant repetition is irrelevant in monosyllabic words. The low frequency of agreement in CVC structures made statistical detection difficult, and the theoretical framework suggests memory constraints apply broadly, even if this specific dataset could not prove it for all word types.
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