Cross‐linguistic acquisition of vowels: English, Korean, Greek, and Cantonese.

Abstract

It has been widely claimed that vowels are acquired earlier than consonants. This is why relatively few studies have focused on investigating acquisition patterns of vowels. However, the acquisition patterns of consonants are not separable from those of vowels and a few studies [e.g., work of MacNeilage (1990)] suggest that vowel acquisition is more complicated than previously assumed. Furthermore, there is relatively little cross‐linguistic research on how children master language‐specific characteristics of vowels. While children show preferences for native‐language vowels by 6 months of age, language‐specific patterns in production emerge considerably later. This study examines cross‐linguistic variation in the location of shared vowels in the vowel space across four languages: English, Korean, Greek, and Cantonese for 2‐year‐old, 5‐year‐old, and adults. The vowels /i/, /u/, and /a/ were elicited in familiar words using a word repetition task. Productions of target words were recorded and transcribed by native speakers of each language. First and second formant frequencies were measured for correctly produced vowels. Language‐specific differences in the location of shared vowels were observed in the formant values of both children and adults. [This work was supported by a Fulbright Fellowship to H.C., and NIDCD Grant 02932 and NSF Grant 0729140 to J.E.]