Child consonant harmony revisited: The role of lexical memory constraints and segment repetition

Young children often produce nontargetlike word forms in which nonadjacent consonants share a major place of articulation (e.g., [gɔgi] ‘doggy’). Termed child consonant harmony (CCH), this phenomenon has garnered considerable attention in the literature, primarily due to the apparent absence of analogous patterns in mature phonological systems. This study takes a close look at a potential account of CCH that is compatible with findings from adult word learning, serial recall and phonological typology. According to this account, CCH is a response to memory pressure involved in remembering and retrieving multiple consonantal contrasts within a word. If this is the main motivation behind CCH, we would expect the resulting child forms to be biased toward full assimilation (i.e., consonant repetition) as it allows maximal reduction of phonolexical memory load. To test this prediction, children’s productions of target words containing consonants that differ in both major place and manner were analyzed using two data sources: a single session sample from 40 one- to two-year-olds learning English, French, Finnish, Japanese, or Mandarin, and longitudinal samples from seven English-learning children between one and three years of age. Prevalence of consonant repetitions was robustly evidenced in early child forms, especially in those produced for target words with the structure CVCV(C). The results suggest that early word production is shaped by constraints on phonolexical memory.