Child language acquisition, Persian consonants, consonant production stages,Frequency. First Steps in the Acquisiton of Persian Consonants: A Case Study

This paper presents the results of a case study investigating the acquisition of Persian consonants by a female child during her 8 to 02 months of age. The production data provide interesting glimpse into one of the ways in which infants acquire language. The infant began to produce more adult-like utterances as physical maturation increased. The data obtained from spontaneous and elicited observations shows that the child's acquisition of consonants took place at four different steps:(1) First Step (from her 8th month to her 12th month) when she started babbling, and produced her first utterances i.e. /bʌbʌ/, /mʌmʌn/, /mʌdæ/. Four consonants /m/, /n/, /b/, /d/ were uttered. Towards the end of this step, the nasals production was completed. (0) Second Step (from her 11th month to her 11th month); at this step, sixteen other consonants appeared for the first time. At the end of this step, the production of plosives, liquids, and roll were completed. Five fricatives /v/, /∫/, /s/, /x/, /z/, seven plosives /g/, /t/, /k/, /p/, /q/, /Ɂ/, /h/, two liquids /l/, /j/, one affricate /ʧ/, one roll /r/ were observed in Fateme’s utterances. (3) Third Step (from her 11th month to her 18th month); at this step, at the end of the fifteenth month affricates emerged by production of /ʤ/ sound. From her 11th month to her 16th month, her performance deteriorated both in quality and quantity towards the end of this step possibly due to some decline in her physical health. Then (1) Fourth and the Last Step (from her 11th month to her 02th month); At this step, the production process started again and had a progressive rate in which she produced all the consonants she could produce before with a high frequency in a lot more cases and the most similar articulatory position to that of adults.

Keywords:

Child language acquisition , Persian consonants , Consonant production steps , Frequency