B. May Bernhardt and Joseph P. Stemberger

Yaaay! The first official results of the study in protracted phonological development across 11 languages (with more popping up out of the woodwork all the time!) that I have the honour to be a part of (as a humble Excel monkey, but given time I hope this role will grow). This gives an overview of the comparison protocol and goals (basically, in what ways are the acquisition of speech sounds and the problems thereof similar and/or different across languages? the initial results presented here are mostly from the English and German data that we've been crunching in the lab--these similar languages show similar results, but definite significant differences in the acquisition of liquids and rhotics (l and r), with the greater difficulty English kids have being tentatively attributed to articulatory complexity--like, English /l/ has a constriction at the back of the throat ("dark l"), whereas German "light l" does not, so the English kids take a lot longer to acquire it! It willbe interesting to see whether totally unrelated languages (on deck are Mandarin and Kuwaiti Arabic) diverge from this already interestingly language-specific pattern in more drastic ways. Presented at PHON 2010.… (altro)