Intervocalic consonants in the speech of typically developing children: emergence and early use.

The purpose of this paper is to present data on the development of intervocalic consonants in the first 2 years of life. The data address three different periods in the production of intervocalic consonants: babble, first words, and words from 21-24 months. The focus of analysis for all three data sets is on the phonetic properties of consonants in intervocalic position, and on comparisons of inventories across word-initial, intervocalic, and final position. For word productions, intervocalic inventories are compared to inventories for initial and final positions. Results of all three studies indicate that intervocalic consonants closely resemble initial consonants in terms of frequency of occurrence and phonetic features.