Asymmetries in the Acquisition of Consonant Clusters in Spanish

Abstract

AbstractThis article considers three children’s acquisition of tauto- and heterosyllabic consonant clusters in Spanish within the framework of Optimality Theory. Each child presents with a unique phonological system with respect to the cluster types. One child, BL4 (female, aged 2;8), reduces tautosyllabic clusters to the least sonorous singleton, but preserves both segments in production of heterosyllabic clusters. A second child, SD1 (female, aged 3;4), preserves both segments of tautosyllabic clusters, but reduces heterosyllabic clusters to the least sonorous singleton. Finally, a third child, SD2 (female, 3;9), reduces both types of clusters, maintaining the least sonorous segment; however, a different pattern is observed withthenasal + voiced stop clusters, which reduce to the most sonorous segment. The inter- and intra-child variation is accounted for by an appeal to general markedness and faithfulness constraints that have been motivated elsewhere in the literature in accounting for syllabic and segmental phenomena in acquisition and beyond.