From phonetic categories to phonological features specification: Acquiring the European Portuguese vowel system

Abstract

Vowels are the Cinderellas in research on the acquisition of phonology. Little is known about how a system of phonologically contrasting vowels is acquired and what evidence children use to build up such a system. On the one hand, studies in infant perception have shown that children’s perception of vowels becomes language specifi c at a very early, at six months of age (Kuhl 1979, Kuhl et al. 1992). In general, infants have been shown to be excellent performers on various language discrimination tasks and they are very good in using statistical patterns in the input language (e.g., Saffran et al. 1996). By the time children start to speak they should have a good idea about what vowels pattern in their native language. Yet, when children start producing words, they do not produce all vowels of the target system, nor do they use all vowels correctly. It has often been noted that low open vowels – i.e. /a/ – appear as the fi rst vowels, an observation which goes at least back to Jakobson (1941/1968) who argued that children start with sounds that are maximally contrasting, hence papa and mama – a maximally closed labial stop followed by a maximally open vowel /a/. Jakobson further hypothesized, based on the typology of vowel systems, that the next contrast will be open vs. closed, i.e. /a/ vs. /i, u/. However, there are very few studies that have gone beyond the very fi rst steps (cp. Davis & MacNeilage 1990).