Dorsal and coronal acquisition in Drehu and French is unexpected by markedness constraints alone

International audiencePhonological development is often described as reflecting "markedness" constraints. For instance, Jakobson (1939) suggests that mastery of the contrast between [grave] labials and [acute] coronals necessarily precedes the more "marked" contrast between [diffuse] dentals and [compact] dorsals. Jakobson's claim is corroborated in Locke's (1983) review of studies of children acquiring English and several other languages, showing more accurate production of [t] relative to [k]. The general idea that speech production and processing universals determine the course of phonological development is developed also by Lindblom (1980), Davis et al. (2002), Wauquier and Yamaguchi (2011), among others. Cross-sectional studies of children acquiring Greek (Nicolaidis et al. 2003), Japanese (Beckman, Yoneyama & Edwards 2003), and Drehu or French (Monnin & Lœvenbruck 2010), by contrast, suggest that any tendency to produce coronals more accurately than dorsals is modulated by language-specific frequencies. In Drehu and French, the highly frequent [k] is slightly more accurate than [t]; in Drehu, the frequent [g], is much more accurate than the rare [d]. It might be argued that this modulation is not due to consonant frequency per se but is related to universal "fronted frames" versus "backed frames" (Davis et al. 2002). To disentangle markedness from language-specific constraints, the present study examines Drehu and French data on [k] and [t] in different vowel contexts