A cross-linguistic perspective on the acquisition of manner of articulation contrasts in the productions of Dutch and German children

The present article investigates the acquisition of Manner of Articulation (MoA) contrasts in child language production. We analyzed spontaneous longitudinal speech data of four German and six Dutch 1- to 3-year-olds. The data suggest that the acquisition of MoA contrasts is influenced by various co-occurrence constraints at the word level. Interestingly, developmental patterns are very similar across languages. However, children seem to follow different strategies to introduce MoA contrasts: They either introduce MoA contrasts in word-initial position in monosyllables as well as in disyllables, or they introduce MoA contrasts in noninitial position in both types of words. We couch the data in a lexical framework assuming that early lexical representation fits templates that evolve in the course of development