Language specificity in the perception of children's productions of /t/ and /k/

Abstract

The age and order of acquisition of what are ostensibly the 'same' sounds can differ across languages. These differences relate to a number of factors, including frequency in the ambient language, language-specific phonetic instantiations of sounds, and language-specific parsing of children's emerging productions (Beckman & Edwards, 2010; Edwards & Beckman, 2008; Li et al, 2011). The current investigation examines the role of adults' perception of children's speech on the acquisition of /t/ and /k/ in English- and Japanese-speaking children. Previous work has shown that /t/ is acquired earlier than /k/ in English, but that the opposite is true in Japanese (Nakanishi et al., 1972; Smit et al., 1990). We examined whether this tendency was due to cross-linguistic differences in adults' perception of English- and Japanese-acquiring children's speech. Native speakers of English and Japanese labeled a large set of 2- to 5-year-old children's word-initial /t/- and /k/ productions. Japanese-speaking adults perceived English-speaking children's productions of sounds intermediate between /t/ and /k/ as more /k/-like than did English-speaking adults. This suggests that the earlier acquisition of /k/ in Japanese than in English may be due, in part, to Japanese-speaking adults' willingness to label ambiguous sounds as /k/-like.