Measuring the roles of variation and phonological density into the development of branching CCV onsets in Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

This study focuses on the acquisition of CCV syllables (Consonant1+Consonant2+Vowel) in Brazilian Portuguese. Our aim is to cast light on the roles of linguistic variation and phonological density into the phonotactic development. We used adult and child directed speech corpora to quantify the optional process of CCV→CV reduction in unstressed contexts in the input, as well as the frequency, segmental pattern, and phonological density of CCV syllables. Based in their distributional properties, we argue that CCV acquisition in BP goes through a moment of incorrect structural and segmental contrast neutralization, modelled by the Tolerance Principle (Yang 2006). The neutralization is caused by an overgeneralization of CCV variation, combined with CCV-CV low density; and an overgeneralization of the C/ɾ/V frequent segmental pattern, combined with the low density of C/ɾ/V-C/l/V but high density and equal frequency of /ɾ/V-/l/V.Data from a mispronunciation detection task confirms that the phonological density influences the development: children who do not articulate CCV syllables detect more CCV→CV stimuli when there are phonological neighbors (/pɾato/→[ˈpa.tʊ], but not /pɾeto/→*[ˈpe.tʊ]) and high phonological density ([l]V↔[ɾ]V are detected, but not C[l]V↔C[ɾ]V, with the lowest rates of detection in the C/l/V→C[ɾ]V direction).