Cross-language Differences in Phonological Acquisition: Swedish and American /t/

Our understanding of phonological acquisition has benefited immensely from cross-linguistic investigations which allow researchers to separate biological and learned factors. To date, most cross-linguistic studies have focused either on differences in phonetic inventories or on differences in frequency of occurrence of particular phonetic and phonological properties in the adult language. This paper describes a third type of study: comparisons of segments that occur in two (or more) languages but differ in their phonetic properties. We present perceptual and acoustic analyses of adult and child productions of word-initial alveolar /t/ in American English and dental /t/ in Swedish. Results showed that listeners' perception of place of articulation was strongly associated with language (alveolar: American English, dental: Swedish) for both adult and child tokens, and was effective in assigning individual speakers to language groups. Three acoustic measures, voice onset time, burst intensity and burst spectral diffuseness correlated with language for both child and adult tokens; the latter two measures correlated with perception as well. The findings suggest that American and Swedish children at 30 months of age have acquired some language-specific phonetic aspects of /t/ phonemes.