Martinez, V. 1 & Diez-Itza, E. 2
1 University of Barcelona, Departament of Basic Psychology
2 University of Oviedo, Departament of Psychology
The study of child phonology tends to focus on phenomena of change during the first three years, and there is little evidence of a later age of transition to adult production models. This is the case of the assimilation process, common in child language and sporadic in adult speech, where the features of a phoneme spread to other more or less close phonemes in the spoken chain, in a progressive (lunales = lunares) or regressive manner (cocadillos = bocadillos). Given the early importance of assimilation, this paper investigates its impact on late phonological development in the light of phonological production models for children and adults.
Spontaneous speech samples were recorded from 240 Spanish-speaking children divided into six age groups, ranging from 3;0 to 5;11 years (3;0, 3;6, 4;0; 4;6; 5;0 y 5;6), with an equal number of girls and boys. Recordings were transcribed and analysed using the tools provided by the CHILDES Project (MacWhinney, 2000), designing a system for categorizing the assimilation process that included directionality (progressive/regressive) and distance (contiguous/non-contiguous). The differences between age groups were tested by Analysis of Covariance.
The results show that the assimilation processes decrease significantly over three late stages, although their proportion in global terms tends to increase. These results would be well compatible with those of Berg (1992), who concludes that the assimilation processes constitute processing strategies to produce sounds that are difficult for the child, and they remain as general principles of production in the adult. Additionally, in this study, more assimilation processes were observed between consonants than between vowels, as were as a higher incidence of assimilation as a whole. These data suggest also a dependency on the type of language.