Abstract
The aim of this study was to provide a cross-linguistic review of acquisition of consonant phonemes to inform speech-language pathologists' expectations of children's developmental capacity by (a) identifying characteristics of studies of consonant acquisition, (b) describing general principles of consonant acquisition, and (c) providing case studies for English, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. A cross-linguistic review was undertaken of 60 articles describing 64 studies of consonant acquisition by 26,007 children from 31 countries in 27 languages: Afrikaans, Arabic, Cantonese, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Jamaican Creole, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Maltese, Mandarin (Putonghua), Portuguese, Setswana (Tswana), Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Turkish, and Xhosa. Most studies were cross-sectional and examined single word production. Combining data from 27 languages, most of the world's consonants were acquired by 5;0 years;months old. By 5;0, children produced at least 93% of consonants correctly. Plosives, nasals, and nonpulmonic consonants (e.g., clicks) were acquired earlier than trills, flaps, fricatives, and affricates. Most labial, pharyngeal, and posterior lingual consonants were acquired earlier than consonants with anterior tongue placement. However, there was an interaction between place and manner where plosives and nasals produced with anterior tongue placement were acquired earlier than anterior trills, fricatives, and affricates. Children across the world acquire consonants at a young age. Five-year-old children have acquired most consonants within their ambient language; however, individual variability should be considered. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.6972857.
Highlights
The aims of this review were to (a) identify and describe studies of consonant acquisition across languages; (b) provide general principles regarding the age of acquisition of consonant phonemes, PCC, early–middle–late consonants, and manner and place characteristics across languages; and (c) consider the application of these general principles to four languages as case studies: English, Korean, Japanese, and Spanish
Source 2 The first author collated a database of studies of children’s speech acquisition over 10+ years from journal articles and by attending conference presentations, visiting speech-language pathology clinics around the world, and contacting colleagues who work in different countries and speak languages other than English
Authors of chapters in the International Guide to Speech Acquisition (McLeod, 2007) were asked to document speech acquisition studies that were developed for the languages they were writing about, and these were included in the review
Summary
The motivation for the current research was to inform SLPs’ expectations of cross-linguistic consonant acquisition. The aims of this review were to (a) identify and describe studies of consonant acquisition across languages; (b) provide general principles regarding the age of acquisition of consonant phonemes, PCC, early–middle–late consonants, and manner and place characteristics across languages; and (c) consider the application of these general principles to four languages as case studies: English, Korean, Japanese, and Spanish
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