Evidence for a minimal competence core of consonant sounds in the speech of African American children: a preliminary study.

Most studies have stressed those aspects of African American English (AAE) that differ from Standard English (SE) varieties. Therefore word-final consonant performance has been investigated most often. In contrast, this intensive study aimed to reveal whether a common core of initial consonants is used by typically developing AAE children at or close to the 3rd birthday. More than 2000 phonetically transcribed utterances were extracted from the audiovisual archives of natural samples of speech for seven children. All seven children met the productivity criterion for a shared core of 15 sounds in their repertoire of correctly produced word-initial consonants. The children also met the criterion for using word-initial consonant clusters or blends that commonly included the stop+sonorant type. The results provided preliminary evidence for a minimal competence core of word-initial consonants that is consistent with developmental data on typically developing speakers of SE and other languages besides English. Sample sizes of more than 50 spontaneous utterances were required to elicit these core features. Research and clinical implications of these results are discussed.