Amoako Wendy Kwakye, Stemberger Joseph Paul, Bernhardt Barbara May, Tessier Anne-Michelle
Department of Linguistics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
School of Audiology and Speech Sciences, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Int J Speech Lang Pathol. 2020 Dec;22(6):626-636. doi: 10.1080/17549507.2020.1825804. Epub 2020 Dec 18.
Although Akan is one of the most widely spoken indigenous languages in Ghana, very little is known about children's phonological development. This paper investigates the development of consonants in Akan among typically developing children aged 3-5 years.
A list of 103 Akan words was compiled, sampling the full range of prosodic structures, sound positions, features and segments, and controlling for word familiarity. A native Akan speaker audio-recorded the 103 single-word productions from each of nine typically developing children aged 3-5 years. The child productions were transcribed and analysed following procedures used in a larger cross-linguistic study. The current study presents results on the acquisition of consonants across the various ages.
Preliminary results indicate that most consonants in Akan are mastered by age 4 or 5, similar to reports for other languages, although /w/ and /l/ showed late mastery, contrary to cross-linguistic observations. The rhotic /ɹ/ and consonants with secondary articulation were still developing at age 4 and showing a variety of mismatch patterns across children.
The findings provide preliminary information for developmentalists and speech-language pathologists on typical phonological development in Akan and contribute to a growing database on language acquisition in Niger-Congo languages.
尽管阿坎语是加纳使用最广泛的本土语言之一，但对于儿童的语音发展却知之甚少。本文研究了3至5岁发育正常儿童阿坎语中辅音的发展情况。
编制了一份包含103个阿坎语单词的列表，对韵律结构、发音位置、特征和音段的全范围进行抽样，并控制单词的熟悉度。一位阿坎语母语者对9名3至5岁发育正常儿童的103个单词发音进行了录音。按照一项更大规模跨语言研究中使用的程序对儿童的发音进行了转录和分析。本研究呈现了不同年龄段辅音习得的结果。
初步结果表明，阿坎语中的大多数辅音在4岁或5岁时被掌握，这与其他语言的报告情况相似，不过/w/和/l/的掌握较晚，这与跨语言观察结果相反。卷舌音/ɹ/和带有次要发音的辅音在4岁时仍在发展，并且在不同儿童中呈现出多种不匹配模式。
这些发现为发展心理学家和言语语言病理学家提供了关于阿坎语典型语音发展的初步信息，并为尼日尔-刚果语系语言习得的数据库增添了内容。
