The Treatment of Final Coda Consonants in the Acquisition of Romanian Phonology

Abstract

Abstract Final consonant deletion has been attested in the acquisition of English (Johnson–Reimers 2010), Chinese (Hua 2002), Dutch (Fikkert 1994), Hebrew (Adi-Bensaid 2015), Spanish (Goldstein–Citron 2001), and Indonesian (Ulaimah et al. 2016). Previous studies on the acquisition of Romanian phonology (Buja 2015a, b) indicated an extremely low incidence of this phenomenon among the Romanian-speaking children. A possible explanation for it could be the inconsistency in collecting the data (child diaries and longitudinal corpora). By means of an experimental study, i.e. a picture-naming task, this paper aims to prove whether Romanian children do drop final coda consonants. The words describing the pictures presented to the children have a C1(-2)VC1 structure (e.g. drum ‘road, way’, cap ‘head’, nas ‘nose’). The subjects in this small-scale research study were nine monolingual Romanian children aged between 2 and 4 years, who were recorded by their parents. Their spontaneous or imitated productions of the target words were transcribed by using IPA. The results of the analysis confirm the predictions made in my previous study (Buja 2015b) – namely that final consonant deletion, a very frequent phonological process in the acquisition of various other languages, is not characteristic of the acquisition of Romanian phonology.