Chapter published in:
Language Variation - European Perspectives VII: Selected papers from the Ninth International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 9), Malaga, June 2017
Edited by Juan-Andrés Villena-Ponsoda, Francisco Díaz Montesinos, Antonio-Manuel Ávila-Muñoz and Matilde Vida-Castro
[Studies in Language Variation 22] 2019
► pp. 134–143

Vowel harmony patterns in Greek dialectal child speech

| University of Crete
| University of Crete
In this study we test the claim that Vowel Harmony (VH) is universally motivated in child speech and facilitates phonological development in non-harmonic languages (Cohen 2012). We analyse a corpus of Greek L1 developmental data from two children raised in a dialectal environment on the island of Crete and exposed to Standard and dialectal Greek, two varieties with a non-harmonic grammar. The data support the claim that not only does VH seem to be universal in nature but it may also affect the order of vowel acquisition. VH is phonologically conditioned in Greek dialectal child speech and determined by prosodic and positional prominence effects, i.e. stress, directionality and sonority. These effects are evident in the distinct developmental paths adopted by different children (inter-language) or in the speech of one child (intra-language).
Keywords: vowel harmony, non-harmonic grammars, dialectal speech, inter- and intra-child variation, universal morphophonological processes
Published online: 12 December 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.22.08kap
References

References

Altan, Asli
2007 The acquisition of vowel harmony in Turkish. Paper presented at the OCP4, 2007 University of the Aegean, Rhodes.Google Scholar
Altan Aslı, Utku, Kaya and Annette Hohenberger
2016 Sensitivity of Turkish infants to vowel harmony in Stem- suffix sequences: Preference shift from familiarity to novelty. In Jennifer Scott and Deb Waughtal (eds.), BUCLD 40 Online Proceedings Supplements. Retrieved from http://​www​.bu​.edu​/bucld​/files​/2016​/09​/BUCLD​_Proceedings​_2016​_01​_25​_altan1​.pdf.
Anderson, Stephen R.
1980 Problems and perspectives in the description of vowel harmony. In Robert M. Vago (ed.), Issues in vowel harmony, 1–48. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Archangeli, Diana and Douglas Pulleyblank
2002 Kinande vowel harmony: Domains, grounded conditions and one-sided alignment. Phonology 19. 139–188. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Becker, Michael, Nihan Ketrez and Andrew Nevins
2011 The surfeit of the stimulus: Analytical biases filter lexical statistics in Turkish devoicing neutralization. Language 87 (1). 84–125. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Beckman, Jill N.
1998  Positional faithfulness . Doctoral dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.Google Scholar
Cohen, Evan-Gary
2012 Vowel harmony and universality in Hebrew acquisition. Brill’s Annual of Afroasiatic Languages and Linguistics 4. 7–29. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gafos, Adamantios and Amanda Dye
2011 Vowel harmony: Transparent and opaque vowels. In Marc van Oostendorp, Colin J. Ewen, Elizabeth Hume and Keren Rice (eds.), The Blackwell companion to phonology, 2164–2189. Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Goad, Heather
1997 Consonant harmony in child-language: An optimality-theoretic account. In S. J. Hannahs and Martha Young-Scholten (eds.), Focus on phonological acquisition, 113–142. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2001 Assimilation phenomena and initial constraint ranking in early grammars. In Anna H.–J. Do, Laura Domínguez and Aimee Johansen (eds.), Proceedings of the 25th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, 307–318. Somerville, Mass.: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Goldsmith, John
1985 Vowel harmony in Khalkha Mongolian, Yaka, Hungarian and Finnish. Phonology Yearbook 2. 253–75. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hatzidakis, George N.
1905 Medieval and Modern Greek Α΄ (in Greek). Athens.Google Scholar
Hayes, Bruce, Péter Siptár, Kie Zuraw and Zsuzsa Londe
2009 Natural and unnatural constraints in Hungarian vowel harmony. Language 85 (4). 822–863. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hohenberger, Annette, Aslı Altan, Utku Kaya, Özgün Köksal-Tuncer and Enes Avcu
2016 Sensitivity of Turkish infants to vowel harmony: Preference shift from familiarity to novelty. In Belma Haznedar and Nihan F. Ketrez (eds.), The acquisition of Turkish in childhood, 29–56. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hohenberger, Annette, Utku Kaya and Aslı Altan
2017 Discrimination of vowel-harmonic vs vowel-disharmonic words by monolingual Turkish infants in the first year of life. In Maria LaMendola and Jennifer Scott (eds.), Proceedings of the 41st annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, 309–322. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Hualde, Jose Ignacio
1989 Autosegmental and metrical spreading in the vowel-harmony systems of Northeastern Spain. Linguistics 27 (5). 773–805. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kaisse, Ellen M.
1985 Connected speech: The interaction of syntax and phonology. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Kappa, Ioanna
2016 Instances of vowel assimilation in the Cretan dialect. In Marina Mattheoudakis and Katerina Nikolaidis (eds.), Selected Papers of the 21st International Symposium on Theoretical and Applied Linguistics (ISTAL 21), 156–165. Thessaloniki: University of Thessaloniki.Google Scholar
Ketrez, Nihan F.
2014 Harmonic cues and speech segmentation: A crosslinguistic study on child-directed speech. Journal of Child Language 41 (2). 439–461.
 CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Leiwo, Matti, Pirjo Kulju and Katsura Aoyama
2006 The acquisition of Finnish vowel harmony. In Mickael Suominen, Antti Arppe, Anu Airola, Orvokki Heinämäki, Matti Miestamo, Urho Määttä, Jussi Niemi, Kari K. Pitkänen and Kaius Sinnemäki (eds.), A man of measure: Festschrift in honour of Fred Karlsson on his 60th birthday. Special supplement to SKY Journal of Linguistics 19. 149–161.Google Scholar
McCarthy, John J.
2004 Headed spans and autosegmental spreading. Unpublished ms. UMass/Amherst. Retrieved from https://​works​.bepress​.com​/john​_j​_mccarthy​/60/
Malikouti-Drachman, Angeliki and Gaberell Drachman
1992 Greek clitics and lexical phonology. In Wolfgang U. Dressler, Hans Ch. Luschützky, Oskar E. Pfeiffer and John R. Rennisson (eds.), Phonologica 1988. 197–206. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Mintz, Toben H., Rachel L. Walker, Ashlee Welday and Celeste Kidd
2018 Infants’ sensitivity to vowel harmony and its role in segmenting speech. Cognition 171. 95–107. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Pycha, Anne, Pawel Nowak, Eurie Shin and Ryan Shosted
2003 Phonological rule-learning and its implications for a theory of vowel harmony. In Gina Garding and Mimu Tsujimura (eds.), Proceedings of the 22nd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 101–114. Somerville: Cascadilla Press.Google Scholar
Revithiadou, Anthi, Marc van Oostendorp, Kalomoira Nikolou and Maria-Anna Tiliopoulou
2006 Vowel harmony in contact‐induced systems: The case of Cappadocian and Silly. In Mark Janse, Brian Joseph and Angela Ralli (eds.), Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Modern Greek Dialects and Linguistic Theory, 350–365. Patra: University of Patras.Google Scholar
Smith, Jennifer
2002 Phonological augmentation in prominent positions. Doctoral Dissertation, UMass/Amherst.Google Scholar
Tzakosta, Marina
2004 Multiple parallel grammars in the acquisition of stress in Greek L1. Doctoral Dissertation, LOT Dissertation Series 93.Google Scholar
2007 Genetic and environmental effects in L1 phonological acquisition: The case of consonant harmony in Greek child speech. Journal of Greek Linguistics 8. 5–30. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2016 A typology of vowel-vowel and consonant-vowel-consonant phenomena in the dialectal variants of Western Crete and its use in education. In Angela Ralli, Nikolaos Koutsoukos and Stavros Bompolas (eds.), Proceedings of the 6th Conference on Modern Greek Dialects and Linguistic Theory, 184–193. Patras: University of Patras.Google Scholar
2017 Language genesis: Development in stages or stage-like development? Ms. University of Crete.Google Scholar
Vroomen, Jean, Jyrki Tuomainen and Beatrice de Gelder
1998 The role of word stress and vowel harmony in speech segmentation. Journal of Memory and Language 38 (2). 133–149. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Walker, Rachel
2005 Weak triggers in vowel harmony. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 23. 917–989. CrossrefGoogle Scholar