Patterns in the acquisition of the spanish trill: A study involving ages 3;0 to 5;6

Abstract

This study describes the substitution patterns of the trill found in naturalistic speech by 34 monolingual Spanish-speaking Costa Rican children between ages 3 and 5;6. In the 843 target-words identified, a total of six different phonetic realizations of the trill were found: a trill [ρ] (2% of the time), an assibilated rhotic [ρ◊] (45% of the time), a post alveolar affricate  [ʤ] (9% of the time), a voiced labio-dental fricative [ω] (17% of the time), a voiced interdental fricative [Δ] (9% of the time), and a lateral approximant [λ] (3% of the time). Interestingly, these phonetic realizations were not used consistently, as children relied on two or more phonetic realizations, regularly within a single session and to pronounce the same word [ρ◊] surfaced most likely as a result of the children’s input,whereas [ω] and [Δ], which are not part of the children’s input, as well as the other phonetic realizations, surfaced most likely as approximations of the articulatorily very complex trill.