Contrast and covert contrast: The phonetic development of voiceless sibilant fricatives in English and Japanese toddlers

This paper examines the acoustic characteristics of voiceless sibilant fricatives in English- and Japanese-speaking adults and the acquisition of contrasts involving these sounds in 2- and 3-year-old children. Both English and Japanese have a two-way contrast between an alveolar fricative (/s/), and a post-alveolar fricative (/ʃ/ in English and /ɕ/ in Japanese). Acoustic analysis of the adult productions revealed cross-linguistic differences in what acoustic parameters were used to differentiate the two fricatives in the two languages and in how well the two fricatives were differentiated by the acoustic parameters that were investigated. For the children's data, the transcription results showed that English-speaking children generally produced the alveolar fricative more accurately than the post-alveolar one, whereas the opposite was true for Japanese-speaking children. In addition, acoustic analysis revealed the presence of covert contrast in the productions of some English-speaking and some Japanese-speaking children. The different development patterns are discussed in terms of the differences in the fine phonetic detail of the contrast in the two languages.