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The Role Of Phonological Similarity In Constructing A Developing Lexicon, Lin Li

Master's Theses

The implicational hierarchy of phonological feature development has proposed that children acquire native phonemic inventory in a systematic way, from the least articulatory-effort-required phonemes to most demanding ones. On the phonemic inventory level, the hierarchy suggests that perceptual features bearing by oral stops /p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, /g/ would appear ahead of perceptual features bearing by fricatives, affricatives and liquids ... while nasals stops ... would emerge in the middle. With the help of age-of-acquisition index and a phonemic change schema, the distributions of 489 phonological neighbors have been examined against the data from MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory to …