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Academic Paper

Title:	Phonotactics and morphophonology in early child language: Evidence from Dutch
Author:	Tania S. Zamuner
Email:	click here to access email
Homepage:	http://www.psych.ubc.ca/~tzamuner/
Institution:	University of British Columbia
Author:	Annemarie Kerkhoff
Email:	click here to access email
Homepage:	http://www.let.uu.nl/~Annemarie.Kerkhoff/personal/
Institution:	Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS
Author:	Paula Fikkert
Email:	click here to access email
Institution:	Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
Linguistic Field:	Language Acquisition; Psycholinguistics
Subject Language:	Dutch
Abstract:	This research investigates children's knowledge of how surface pronunciations of lexical items vary according to their phonological and morphological context. Dutch-learning children aged 2.5 and 3.5 years were tested on voicing neutralization and morphophonological alternations. For instance, voicing does not alternate between the pair [pɛt]~[pɛtən] (cap~caps) but does in [bɛt]~[bɛdən] (bed~beds). Data from the first experiment showed that children at a younger age were less accurate at imitating words with /d/ than /t/, regardless of morphological context. In a second study, children between 2 and 4 years were asked to produce singulars from novel plurals (e.g., [kɛtən]~[kɛt] and [kɛdən]~[kɛt]). Results indicated that children's performance was better in contexts that did not require surface variation. Dutch-learning children are not able to robustly generalize their knowledge of phonotactics and morphophonological alternations. Rather, it appears that their knowledge is more concrete, in line with recent usage-based theories of acquisition.

	This article appears in Applied Psycholinguistics Vol. 33, Issue 3, which you can read on Cambridge's site or on LINGUIST .

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