Are palatal consonants articulated by multiple tongue gestures (coronal and dorsal) or by a single gesture that brings the tongue into contact with the palate at several places of articulation? The lenition of palatal consonants (resulting in approximants) has been presented as evidence that palatals are simple, not complex: When reduced, they do…

Spontaneous and imitated-sentence responses of six children were examined for their sound patterns in the acquisition of /x/, /f/, and /s/. The data tend to support the position that children may produce forms exemplifying geographical-dialectical constraints, general developmental processes, and variability in development across children.…

Finds no differences in the degree to which adults and seven-year-old children generalized Spanish stress patterns, although the children showed less interference from English stress patterns than the adults. (Author/RL)

Eighteen experimental corpora of spontaneous speech in five languages (English, Finnish, French, German, and Spanish) were examined under hypothesis that they are characterized by commonalities in use of time. Each study, based on story telling elicited by pictures, confirmed hypothesis. In addition, further support for hypothesis was found by…

Behavioral studies have shown that while young infants can discriminate many different phonetic contrasts, a shift from a language-general to a language-specific pattern of discrimination is found during the second semester of life, beginning earlier for vowels than for consonants. This age-related decline in sensitivity to perceive non-native…