The Contribution of Functional Load on Children's Vocalic Development

Children's phonology is replete with regular, predictable phenomena that nevertheless differ from adults. Discrepancies between adult and child speech cannot solely be attributed to environmental input, so immature motor development is often cited. Normally-developing children quickly acquire the motor skills and segment planning necessary to avoid these "errors." But phonological development continues well into late-childhood. For example, age and segment duration/variability are negatively correlated in English and French. Here we present contradictory data from Chuquisaca Quechua that show children producing shorter vowel durations than adults and attribute this to the role of functional load (FL). Interest in FL as an explanatory device for phoneme merger and segment inventories has recently resurfaced, but extension of the metric to phonological acquisition has been limited. FL is an important concept to apply to children's speech development because children's relatively smaller lexicons may lead them to make different generalizations regarding the relative importance of certain phonological contrasts. We test this hypothesis in Chuquisaca Quechua, a language where we predict maximal distinctiveness between adult and child lexica due to the language's morphological structure. We find that FL addresses this developmental pattern in the children's vowels

Are neutral roots in Uyghur really neutral? Evaluating a covert phonemic contrast

This paper looks at the case of so-called neutral roots in Uyghur (Turkic: China), whose idiosyncratic behavior with respect to the backness harmony system has been analyzed as stemming from a covert vowel contrast. Based on considerations of the structural properties of the language and the results of an experimental study, we suggest that an analysis based on lexical exceptionality is more parsimonious than the traditional analysis, unifying the treatment of neutral roots with other cases of exceptionality in the harmony system and accounting for a relationship between the patterning of roots and their frequency. We close by discussing implications for covert contrast analyses in general

Sociophonetic variation in Bolivian Quechua uvular stops

Quechua is an indigenous language of the Andes region of South America. In Cochabamba, Bolivia, Quechua and Spanish have been in contact for over 500 years. In this thesis, I explore sociolinguistic variation among bilingual speakers of Cochabamba Quechua (CQ) and Spanish by investigating the relationship between the production of the voiceless uvular stop /q/ and speakers’ sociolinguistic backgrounds. I conducted a speech production study and sociolinguistic interview with seven bilingual CQ-Spanish speakers. I analyzed manner of articulation and place of articulation variation. Results indicate that manner of articulation varies primarily due to phonological factors, and place of articulation varies according to sociolinguistic factors. This reveals that among bilingual CQ-Spanish speakers, production of voiceless uvular stop /q/ does vary sociolinguistically