The feature [+spread glottis] ([+s.g.]) denotes that a speech sound is produced with a wide glottal aperture with audible voiceless airflow. Icelandic is unusual in the degree to which [+spread glottis] is involved in the phonology: in /h/, pre-aspirated and post-aspirated stops, voiceless fricatives and voiceless sonorants. The ubiquitousness of the feature could potentially affect the rate and process of its acquisition. This paper investigates the development of [+s.g.] in Icelandic, both in general and in a range of contexts, in a cross-sectional study of 433 typically developing Icelandic-speaking children aged two to seven years. As a feature, [+s.g.] is acquired early in Icelandic, although specific sound classes lag behind due to other output constraints. Children reach mastery of [+s.g.] by age three except in word-initial post-aspirated stops and voiceless nasals. Findings are interpreted in light of the literature on the feature and its development.

Computational models of reading have tended to focus on the cognitive requirements of mapping among written, spoken, and meaning representations of individual words in adult readers. Consequently, the alignment of these computational models with behavioural studies of reading development has to date been limited. Models of reading have provided us with insights into the architecture of the reading system, and these have recently been extended to investigate literacy development, and the early language skills that influence children’s reading. These models show us: how learning to read builds on early language skills, why various reading interventions might be more or less effective for different children, and how reading develops across different languages and writing systems. Though there is growing alignment between descriptive models of reading behaviour and computational models, there remains a gap, and I lay out the groundwork for how translation may become increasingly effective through future modelling work.

While consonant acquisition clearly requires mastery of different articulatory configurations (segments), sub-segmental features and suprasegmental contexts influence both order of acquisition and mismatch (error) patterns (Bérubé, Bernhardt, Stemberger & Ciocca, 2020). Constraints-based nonlinear phonology provides a comprehensive framework for investigating the impact of sub- and suprasegmental impacts on acquisition (Bernhardt & Stemberger, 1998). The current study adopted such a framework in order to investigate these questions for Granada Spanish. Single-word samples of monolingual preschoolers in Granada (29 typically developing; 30 with protracted phonological development) were transcribed by native Spanish speakers in consultation with an international team. Beta regression analyses showed significant effects of age, developmental group, and word structure variables (word length, stress, position of consonants and syllables within the word); salience, markedness and/or frequency across the phonological hierarchy accounted for many patterns. The study further demonstrates the impacts of sub- and suprasegmental constraints of the phonological system on consonant acquisition.

Variegation – the presence of more than one supraglottal consonant per word – is a key challenge for children as they increase their expressive vocabulary toward the end of the single-word period. Here we consider the prosodic structures of target words and child forms in English, Finnish, French, Japanese and Mandarin to determine whether children learning these languages respond similarly to the challenge or instead differ in ways related to the phonological structure of the adult language. Based on proportional occurrence of each structure, we find that the word forms of children learning Mandarin and Japanese show more variegation than do those of children learning the European languages, although their target words do not; proportions of reduplication, consonant harmony and single-consonant words also differ by language. We conclude that experience with the structure of the language – and thus representation, as well as immature articulatory skills – shapes children’s responses to variegation.

This paper addresses how input variability in the adult phonological system is mastered in the output of young children in Akan, a Kwa language spoken in Ghana, involving variability between labio-palatalized consonants and front rounded vowels. The high-frequency variant involves a complex consonant which is expected to be mastered late, while the low-frequency variant involves a front rounded vowel which is expected to be mastered relatively early. Late mastery of complex consonants was confirmed. The high-frequency labiopalatalized-consonant variant was absent at age 3 and not yet mastered even at age 5. All children produced the easier-to-produce low-frequency front-rounded-vowel variant, most at far greater frequency than in adult speech, implying that a child's output limitations can affect which variant the child targets for production. Modular theories, in which phonological plans reflect only the characteristics of adult input, fail to account for our results. Non-modular theories are implicated.

This research investigates selectivity in word learning for bilingual infants. Previous work demonstrated that bilingual infants show greater openness to non-native language sounds in object labels than monolinguals (Hay et al., 2015; Singh, 2018). It remains unclear whether bilingual openness extends to nonspeech sounds. We presented 14- and 19-month-old bilinguals with object labels consisting of nonspeech tones. Monolinguals recently displayed learning of the same labels at 14 months, but not 19 months (Graf Estes et al., 2018). In contrast, bilinguals failed to learn the labels. We propose that hearing phonological variation across two languages helps bilinguals reject nonspeech word forms.

Onomatopoeia appear in high quantities in many infants’ earliest words, yet there is minimal research in this area. Instead, findings from the wider iconicity literature are generalised to include onomatopoeia, leading to the assumption that their iconic status makes them inherently learnable, thereby prompting their early production. In this review we bring together the literature on onomatopoeia specifically and iconicity more generally to consider infants’ acquisition from three perspectives: perception, production, and interaction. We consider these findings in relation to Imai and Kita’s (2014) ‘sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis’ to determine whether their framework can account for onomatopoeia alongside other iconic forms.

In lexical development, the specificity of phonological representations is important. The ability to build phonologically specific lexical representations predicts the number of words a child knows (vocabulary breadth), but it is not clear if it also fosters how well words are known (vocabulary depth). Sixty-six children were studied in kindergarten (age 5;7) and first grade (age 6;8). The predictive value of the ability to learn phonologically similar new words, phoneme discrimination ability, and phonological awareness on vocabulary breadth and depth were assessed using hierarchical regression. Word learning explained unique variance in kindergarten and first-grade vocabulary depth, over the other phonological factors. It did not explain unique variance in vocabulary breadth. Furthermore, even after controlling for kindergarten vocabulary breadth, kindergarten word learning still explained unique variance in first-grade vocabulary depth. Skill in learning phonologically similar words appears to predict knowledge children have about what words mean.

Naturalistic data are a useful source for language acquisition research. Recently, the emphasis has been placed on using denser corpora, in order to capture a more accurate picture of child language development. However, working with large amounts of data raises resource issues, since it is time-consuming to record and to transcribe. In this article, I focus on what would be the ideal duration of a naturalistic recording for it to be considered a representative enough sample of children's linguistic behaviours to observe the acquisition of words and sounds. Some of the results suggest that 30 minutes of recording may be enough to capture these specific developments, but these results are discussed in the perspective of what an ideal session could be.

Some researchers have suggested that young children choose to say mainly words containing sounds they can produce and avoid words with sounds they find difficult to produce. This proposed pattern of ‘selection’ supports a hypothesis of dominance of phonological factors in words children choose to say. Based on longitudinal spontaneous data samples during their first 50 word period, word-based tokens produced by two English and two French monolingual children were analyzed. Token frequencies in spontaneously produced word targets (SW-T) were compared to children's actual productions (SW-A) of those target words to understand relationships between targets children choose to say and their patterns in actual productions, (i.e., to evaluate the presence of ‘selection’). Place of articulation (i.e., labial, coronal and dorsal) in initial word position within CV, CVC, and CVCV word forms was compared. Analysis of spontaneous output in daily interactions in children learning two languages with differing phonological systems enables a more general evaluation of issues related to the interface of phonological and lexical aspects during the earliest period of language acquisition.

This study examines the acquisition of /r/ in German and Spanish monolingual and bilingual children. German and Spanish are characterized by different /r/s. German has a uvular approximant whereas Spanish has an alveolar tap and trill. Words containing /r/ were extracted from longitudinal recordings of the children, aged 1;9 to 3;6. Results indicate that monolingual German children acquired uvular /r/ earlier than monolingual Spanish children acquired the tap and trill. The bilingual children acquired uvular /r/ similarly to the monolingual children or, in the case of /r/ clusters, they were mildly delayed. They were advanced in the acquisition of alveolar tap and they produced more /r/-like errors for the trill. Transfer patterns were observed in one child but they could not be explained by markedness or language dominance. Findings are consistent with cross-linguistic interaction in the acquisition of /r/, in which the phonological systems of the bilinguals approximate each other.

The importance of phonemic awareness knowledge in learning to be literate his wellestablished. One dimension of its acquisition, the developmental trend from an implicit awareness of rimes to an explicit awareness of phonemes, has attracted substantial interest.A second dimension, a trend in the amount of phonemic knowledge that can be manipulated, or phonemic awareness span, is examined in the present study. One hundred and sixty children from Preparatory (Prep) to Grade 3 completed five phonological tasks: rhyming, onset-rime segmentation, initial sound recognition, phoneme segmentation, and phoneme substitution. Each task involved words ranging in length from three to five phonemes. Phoneme segmentation and substitution tasks involved words with six phonemes. Over this grade range, phonemic length influenced performance for each task. The nature of the influence varied with grade level; performance for the developmentally simpler tasks was affected at the lower grade levels, whereas the more complex tasks were affected at the higher grades. These trends supported gradual differentiation of phonological knowledge into a network of phonemic units. There are implications for dyslexia subtyping, for reading disabilities diagnosis, and for instructional design.