You have no items in your shopping cart.
ABSTRACT
Previous investigations on developmental phonology reveal that children who are yet to cope with the complexity of consonant clusters unconsciously simplify the clusters by means of any of these phonological processes such as substitution, metathesis, coalescence, epenthesis and reduction by deletion. This study focuses on realization of the double onset and coda consonant clusters in the speech of the selected Nigerian preschoolers of English as L1 within the framework of Sonority theory.
The study employs mixed approaches- quantitative and qualitative methods of analyses to explain the variant patterns of reduction observed. These methods enable us to subject the data captured through numerical means to a further descriptive based analysis..
The results of this investigation uphold the assumption that children’s cluster reductions are sonority-driven. The study shows that the least sonorous segment of two-member initial clusters is more preserved. The results also reflect the prediction of Sonority Hypothesis that children would preserve the most sonorous consonant of a final cluster except for the reduction of the final liquid stop clusters which violate this prediction.
