The development of segmental phonology in a mixed language environment: a case study from Northern East Cree (original) (raw)

In this thesis I discuss the segmental development of a child (code-named Ani) learning Northern East Cree throughout ten sessions documenting the acquisition of her speech (ranging in age from 2;01.14 to 3;08.24). Although Ani was not a native speaker of English, she was exposed to some English through media sources (i.e. television and radio) and attempted to produce both Cree and English words in her spoken utterances. I describe Ani's word productions in both languages in order to obtain a clear picture of her phonological development as a whole. Building on previous research (e.g. Pearson et a!. 1997; Kuhl, Tsao & Liu 2003; Kuhl 2007; Hoff et al. 2012), I hypothesize that Ani does not actually learn the phonology of English, but rather produces both Cree and English words using a single phonotactic system, that of her native language. Ani's productions of English words are thus filtered through her Cree inventory of phones and syllable structure, causing consonants or s...