Comparison of the Development of the Rhotic in Children Acquiring British and American English
- DOI
- 10.2991/assehr.k.210609.061How to use a DOI?
- Keywords
- language acquisition, rhotic, development, British English, American English
- Abstract
This paper reports on a study into the acquisition of rhotic phonemes by children acquiring British and American English, and compares the results with those obtained earlier for bilingual children acquiring Welsh and English. It concentrates on the acquisition of the rhotic consonants, that is, the differences in the patterns of realization of /r/ between a North American child Julia and a British child Jane. The study demonstrates a wide range of substitutions of /r/ made by the North American child Julia and the British child Jane is consistent with the results reported for Welsh-English bilingual children. We also found that the older the children become, the less variation is found in the substitutions used for approximant /r/. It is also shown that there is an acoustic reason for the choice of the commonest of them. While for Welsh and English bilingual children the sounds are clearly different, neither the trill nor the approximant demonstrate 100% accurate usage even in the oldest age group of subjects (4;6 – 5;0) (although the approximant does approach 90%, same as for North American and British children). Therefore, they belong to the group of consonants acquired last in their respective languages.
- Copyright
- © 2021, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.
- Open Access
- This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).
Cite this article
TY - CONF AU - Jia Shi PY - 2021 DA - 2021/06/10 TI - Comparison of the Development of the Rhotic in Children Acquiring British and American English BT - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Language, Art and Cultural Exchange (ICLACE 2021) PB - Atlantis Press SP - 302 EP - 307 SN - 2352-5398 UR - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.210609.061 DO - 10.2991/assehr.k.210609.061 ID - Shi2021 ER -