An analysis of velar fronting in child phonology based on a longitudinal corpus study

Abstract

Velar fronting is a well-known phenomenon in child phonology where velars in prosodically strong position are produced as coronals, due to child’s articulatory limitations. Velar fronting is one of the unnatural phonological processes that are observed only in child, not in any known adult system. Velar fronting in one child is closely investigated through a longitudinal study using the CHILDES corpus. It turns out that the acquisition of velar production is achieved during a period of four months, yielding an S-shaped developmental curve. The result of the longitudinal study supports a view that in phonological acquisition, constraint demotion does not take place immediately but gradually as the Gradual Learning Algorithm (GLA) predicts. Assuming that velar fronting arises from the gap between perception and production in child, an Optimality-Theoretic analysis is provided, based on the framework in Pater (2004). Finally, a learning simulation is conducted using the GLA with the proposed constraint schema, fed by the real-life corpus data. The results show how ranking values of relevant constraints change over time in a child.