Phonological Universals in Early Childhood: Evidence from Sonority Restrictions

Across languages, onsets with large sonority distances are preferred to those with smaller distances (e.g., bw>bd>lb; Greenberg 1978 Greenberg, Joseph H. 1978. “Some generalizations concerning initial and final consonant clusters.”. In Universals of human language. Vol. 2: Phonology Edited by: Greenberg, Joseph H., Charles Ferguson, A. and Edith Moravcsik, A. 243–279. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.. [Google Scholar]). Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 2004) attributes such facts to grammatical restrictions that are universally active in all grammars. To test this hypothesis, here we examine whether children extend putatively universal sonority restrictions to onsets unattested in their language. Participants (M = 4;03) were presented with pairs of auditory words—either identical (e.g., lbif⇉lbif) or epenthetically related (e.g., lbif⇉lebif)—and asked to judge their identity. Results showed that, like adults, children's ability to detect epenthetic distortions was monotonically related to sonority distance (bw>bd>lb), and their performance was inexplicable by several statistical and phonetic factors. These findings suggest that sonority restrictions are active in early childhood, and their scope is broad.