Production Of Tautosyllabic Consonant Clusters In Mexican Children

Hildeliza Layseca López

Language Acquisition 1



Production of Tautosyllabic Consonant Clusters in Mexican Children

1. Introduction

This essay is about the phonetic development in Mexican children. Mexican children of 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 years old were taped to identify at what age does the tautosyllabic consonant clusters (those that are part of the samesyllable e.g. /tr-/ in “trailer”) are produced correctly. These children repeated some words with tautosyllabic consonant clusters in initial position, middle position and in the final syllable.

The purpose of this essay is to answer the following questions:

• When are Mexican children able to produce consonant clusters?

• What is the order of production of consonant clusters?▪ Which consonant clusters are produced earlier?




The general objective is to follow the production of tautosyllabic consonant clusters in Mexican children. The specific objectives are: 1) to describe when Mexican children are able to produce consonant clusters, and 2) to identify which kinds of consonant clusters are produced at what age.




The first tautosyllabicconsonant clusters (in this case bl, br, cl, cr, dr, fl, fr, gl, gr, pl, pr, tl and tr) that are well produced by children will be identified. It will be determine if the place of the tautosyllabic consonant clusters in the word affects its pronunciation. The consonant clusters in this case are in an initial position, middle position and in the last syllable.




There have been some studiesof the production of consonant clusters. The following are with Spanish-speaking children and with English-speaking children.

Jessica A. Barlow in her paper “Sonority Effects in the Production of Consonant Clusters by Spanish-Speaking Children” studied the production of tautosyllabic consonant clusters and heterosyllabic consonant clusters (those that are split across two syllables e.g./-nt-/ in “winter”. She found out that the tautosyllabic consonant clusters in most of the cases were reduced (e.g. the word “plato” was pronounced as [pato] and “bloque” as [boke]). However heterosyllabic consonant clusters were pronounced appropriately (e.g. the Spanish word “elefante” was pronounced as [elefante] and “dulces” as [dulses]).

Teresa Vanderweide in her paper “A PerceptualAnalysis of Consonant Cluster Reduction” examined patterns of reduction in which children reduced a word initial consonant cluster of the form C1C2V by deleting either the first (C1) or second (C2) member of the consonant cluster. She observed that children often retain the last sonorous member of the cluster (e.g. the word “please” was pronounced as [piz] and “clean” as [kin]); however, in clustersof /s/ followed by a sonorant, children retain the more sonorant member of the cluster (e.g. the word “slug” was pronounced as [lʌg].)

Robyn Merkel-Piccini in the article “What´s new in speech! PhonologicalProcesses”, published by Super Duper Publications, affirmed that by the first grade, or by age 7, cluster reduction, epenthesis, gliding, vocalization and stopping should be resolved.The most common processes that persist are stopping, gliding, and cluster reduction. When these processes persist speech therapy is indicated.



The data will be obtained by taping Mexican children of 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 years old repeating a list of words with tautosyllabic consonant clusters in initial position, middle position and in the last syllable. The following list contains thewords with tautosyllabic consonant clusters that the children are going to repeat. The words are divided according to the position of the tautosyllabic consonant clusters.




|Consonant Cluster |Initial Position |Middle Position |Last syllable |
|bl |Blanco - Blusa...