| Abstract |
The present thesis focused on the acquisition of the well-formed stop-liquid/nasal and fricative-liquid/nasal clusters in Standard Modern Greek. The data of this study are drawn from a longitudinal study of two typically developing Standard Modern Greek-acquiring children, SPI (age: 2;01,24 – 3;04,11) and DIM (age: 1;10,29 – 2;05, 15). The results indicate that, in the early intermediate phase, children’s grammar does not allow complex onsets to emerge. Children apply several simplification strategies, i.e. reduction to the less sonorous or to the more sonorous (contiguity), coalescence, deletion of the entire cluster and epenthesis. The prevalent repair strategy is cluster reduction and children follow the sonority pattern. Also, in the data of the one child, coalescence may reflect a sub-stage in cluster acquisition, as instances of coalescence start fading away when faithfully produced target forms for each cluster type are realized. Hence, coalescence may serve as predictor for cluster acquisition. Also, regarding the process of deletion of the entire cluster and of contiguity, in the data of the one child, they have complementary distributions, namely contiguity is observed in labial-initial clusters while cluster deletions occur in dorsal- and coronal-initial clusters. Additionally, this study shows that stop-liquid and fricative-liquid clusters emerge in the medial intermediate phase. Faithfull productions of stop/fricative-nasal cluster were not observed in children’s data. The results indicate that there is inter-child variation regarding the order of acquisition of clusters and the position in which clusters emerge first. Also, it seems that stress may not force the retention of the entire cluster. In addition, our study shows that the child’s age cannot be considered as predictor for the phonological acquisition, i.e. a younger child may be more linguistically advanced than an older one. Also, this thesis provide evidence that the input frequency may not be considered as strong predictor for cluster acquisition.
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The acquisition of complex onsets and the role of input frequency in the greek child speech
