A Phonological Analysis of Schwa in German First Language Acquisition (original) (raw)
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Syllables and schwa: normal and impaired first language acquisition
Frankfurter Linguistische Forschung Sondernummer 11, 2008
In dem vorliegenden Artikel werden die Sprechdaten eines deutschen Kindes mit einer expressiven spezifischen Sprachentwicklungsstörung (SSES) in Hinsicht auf zwei Themengebiete analysiert. Das erste Themengebiet beinhaltet die Analyse der vom Kind produzierten Silbenstrukturen, das zweite fokussiert die Entwicklung der Prosodie. Bei letzterer steht die Realisierung des Schwa im Vordergrund. Für beide Gebiete wird die Frage aufgeworfen, ob sie eine Erklärung für die Sprachstörung des Kindes liefern können. Die Entwicklung des phonetischen und phonemischen Inventars wird in diesem Artikel nicht berücksichtigt, weil die Analyse auf die Silbenstruktur und das Schwa beschränkt wird.
Belgrade English Language and Literature Studies, 2021
This article presents a study that seeks to investigate whether or not the English neutral vowel schwa (henceforth-schwa) poses difficulties to a group of intermediate students of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) whose first language is Norwegian (further-participants). The study involves a corpus of phonemic transcriptions written by the participants in the series of 4 tasks. In the corpus, schwa-related errors are identified in accordance with the methodological approach formulated by Mompean and Fouz-González (2021). The results reveal several substitutions of schwa
Journal of Child Language, 2003
Studies of vowel length acquisition indicate an initial stage in which phonological vowel length is random followed by a stage in which either long vowels (without codas) or short vowels and codas are produced. To determine whether this sequence of acquisition applies to a group of German-speaking children (three children aged 1;3-2; 6), monosyllabic and disyllabic words were transcribed and acoustically analysed. The results did not support a stage in which vowel length was totally random. At the first time period (onset of word production to 1;7), one child's monosyllabic productions were governed by a bipositional constraint such that either long vowels, or short vowels and codas were produced. At the second (1 ; 10 to 2; 0) and third time periods (2; 3 to 2;6), all three children produced target long vowels significantly longer than target short vowels. Transcription results indicated that children experienced more difficulty producing target long than short vowels. In the discussion, the findings are interpreted in terms of the representation of vowel length in children's grammars.
Phonetic reduction versus phonological deletion of French schwa: Some methodological issues
Journal of Phonetics, 2011
A categorical phonological process of deletion is traditionally assumed to account for the alternation of schwa with zero in French. This process is assumed to result in two discrete outputs: forms with schwa (i.e., schwa variants) and forms without schwa (i.e., non-schwa variants). However, the two studies we present here suggest a more complex picture. In the first study, we investigate the phonetic variability of schwa in a large number of occurrences of schwa variants and find that schwa, like other segments in French, undergoes phonetic reduction. As a consequence, some tokens without schwa in connected speech may be the result of a process of gradual phonetic reduction rather than the result of a categorical process of alternation. In the second study, we examine the perception of schwa word tokens extracted from connected speech. We show that deciding whether a token was produced with or without the schwa is not always possible. Furthermore, listeners rely on other types of cues than acoustic ones in order to make their judgements (i.e., speech rate, word length and segmental context). These findings have important theoretical and methodological implications that must be taken into account in the empirical study of French schwa alternation.►French schwa, when realized, undergoes phonetic reduction like other segments. ►The distinction between schwa and non-schwa variants can be perceptually ambiguous. ►The perception of schwa does not depend exclusively on acoustic cues. ►Results raise methodological issues on the distinction between reduction and deletion.
2003
The current paper reports on a study which fits in a larger investigation on variability in the pronunciation of Standard Dutch, as spoken in the Netherlands and the Flemish part of Belgium. In particular, it deals with the factors that determine the possible insertion of a schwa in specific consonant clusters at the end of words. Our study reveals that the absence or occurrence of such an extra vowel is dependent on regional, social and phonotactic determinants. We discuss how this finding, in combination with other results on speech variability, is important for speech technological applications, both for synthesis and recognition.
German Segments in the Speech of German-Spanish Bilingual Children
Multilingual Individuals and Multilingual Societies published by John Benjamins Publishers, 2012
The production of segments in a first language (L1) has been reported to be different in bilingual children as compared with monolingual children. Often, consonants involve a delay in the bilinguals' data (see, e.g., Lleó & Rakow 2006), whereas vowels are usually not associated with any delay (see Kehoe 2002). The present work shows new data that suggest that consonants, in this case the ones involved in the German voicing contrast (which is neutralized in final position), contribute to a delay in bilingual acquisition. A vowel, specifically, German underlying schwa, did not cause any delay. In fact, target-like production of schwa seems to have been subject to acceleration in the case of the bilinguals.
The preservation of schwa in the converging phonological system of Frenchville (PA) French
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 2005
The phonological system of the French of Frenchville, Pennsylvania (USA) demonstrates a dramatic case of transfer in the latest (and last) generation of bilingual French–English speakers: the mid front round vowels, [œ] and [ø], have often been replaced by the English rhoticized schwa as found in the word sir. However, French schwa, which is arguably phonetically non-distinct from the mid front round vowels, does not participate fully in this merger. This result is unexpected given both the phonetic identity of schwa and [ø], and the fact that our speakers are not literate in French and, as such, have no access to the differential orthographic representations manifest between schwa and the mid front round vowels. The data argue strongly that schwa is, in some sense, “real” for these speakers. Based on a phonetic analysis of the vowels under consideration, we argue that transfer between two sound systems cannot be perceived as a simple case of phonetic replacement. Instead, transfer ...