The Acquisition of the Uvular Rhotic by French–Portuguese Bilingual Children

The current article documents the development of the uvular rhotic in bilingual children in Portugal speaking European French (EF) and European Portuguese (EP), and it considers possible crosslinguistic influence (CLI) between the languages. The uvular rhotic has several phonetic variants in both languages and different distributional properties; EP also has an alveolar tap. Single-word spontaneous naming data were elicited from bilingual children (aged 3;6–4;3: five balanced bilinguals, four EF-dominant children, and one EP-dominant child) and transcribed phonetically by three trained transcribers. Most of the children showed mastery of the singleton uvular rhotic in French, but only three children did in EP. The rhotic was also more advanced in clusters in French. The children exhibited several phonetic variants, the uvular voiced fricative being the most common in both languages, in accordance with adult targets in each language. No signs of CLI were observed for the rhotic with respect to age of acquisition, phonetic variants, and mismatches, except for one child, who showed a phonetic transfer from EF into EP. We argue that, at least in this case, CLI may be a child-specific phenomenon.