Phonological Processes in Brahvi Child Language Acquisition

Abstract

This study renders an Optimality Theoretic (Prince & Smolensky, 2004) analysis of words produced by a child Manahil (M) who was acquiring Brahvi as her L1 in the age of 12 to 25 months. The study focuses on acquisition of consonants of Brahvi. This study also examines the phonological processes operative in Brahvi child language acquisition. The data were collected through a diary study. The subject of this study, Manahil, had a pure monolingual setting as both her parents are native speakers of Southern (Jhalawani) Brahvi. The findings suggest that in the early stages of L1 acquisition M avoids the most marked structures and sounds and applies different phonological tactics like deletion, substitution, fortition, etc. to overcome her production difficulties. The study also indicates the order of acquisition of L1 consonants in Brahvi children. M’s order of acquisition is from unmarked to marked segments and structure. She acquired coronal sounds before labial and dorsal segments. Thus, the ranking *DORSAL >> *LABIAL >> *CORONAL in the grammar of the child is confirmed. In her early productions she deleted fricatives, affricates, rhotics and velar stops at initial stage of learning. The CVC structure is marked for M. She, therefore, changes CVC syllables into CV by deleting the coda consonant. Weak or unstressed syllables are also deleted in her lexicon. She also reduces consonant clusters deleting more sonorous light syllables and retaining less sonorous heavy syllables (e.g. /mo.'bæl/ ? ['bæl]). Substitution is another major phonological process operative in her productions. Velar stops, fricatives and affricates are substituted with coronal stops which confirms that coronal stops are acquired before any other consonant. The substitution of fricatives and affricates with coronal stops is applied to avoid feature [+continuant] at the initial stage of learning. At later stage, rhotics /r/ and /?/ are substituted with lateral [l] which confirms that the anterior consonants are acquired before the posterior ones in Brahvi child language acquisition. The overall findings show that Markedness constraints outrank Faithfulness constraints in her grammar when a child is acquiring Brahvi as L1. This is in line with universal pattern of first language acquisition.