THE INFLUENCE OF FREQUENCY ON WORD-INITIAL OBSTRUENT ACQUISITION IN HEXAGONAL FRENCH

This study extends a cross-linguistic collaboration on phonological development, which aims to compare production of word-initial obstruents across sets of languages which have comparable consonants that differ in overall frequency or in the frequency with which they occur in analogous sound sequences. By comparing across languages, the influence of language-specific distributional patterns on consonant mastery can be disentangled from the effects of more general phonetic constraints on development. In preparation for extending the comparison to Hexagonal French, we counted type frequencies in French databases and did a preliminary experiment with French-acquiring two-year-old children