Metathesis in Language Acquisition of Greek

Abstract

This study investigates metathesis in children so that to see if it facilitates their language development and in which way. For this reason, thirteen Greek-speaking children are examined varying in age from 2;6.9 to 6;1.26. The data come from picture naming and spontaneous speech. Their examination reveals that its emergence lies to segmental, prosodic and phonotactic reasons. More specifically, metathesis helps children avoid specific sequences of consonants by switching them positions. It also assists them to avoid clusters located in unstressed syllables or illicit structures in the ambient language, as complex codas in loanwords. All metathesized segments are located in positions that can occupy according to the rules of Greek. For the data analysis, Optimality Theory is used (Prince & Smolensky, 1993), while we adopt the Multiple Parallel Grammars model (Revithiadou & Tzakosta, 2004) for the two different patterns attested in their speech.