How long is a vowel? A first look at quantitative vowels of four year old Samoan speaking children Elaine Ballard and Helen Charters University of Auckland 10 July 2009

Vowel acquisition research Spanish –5 vowel system –Accuracy around 93% for 2 year olds –Accuracy reaches 98% for 3 & 4 year olds (Goldstein 2007) English –26 vowel system –Vowels are produced without errors by the age of 3 (Templin 1957) –Over 90 % accurate with their vowel production by the fourth year of their life. (Dodd, Holm et. al 2003)

Interpretation Children acquire vowel inventories much earlier on than consonantal ones Children do not generally produce errors in acquisition of vowels –(Zhu Hua and B. Dodd 2006)

Samoan Western Polynesian language 131,103 people of Samoan ethnicity live in New Zealand (Statistics New Zealand 2006) Samoan community is the largest Pasifika community in NZ, mostly living in Auckland

Vowels –5 qualitatively different /i e a u o/ (Mosel & Hovdhaugen 1992) Phonemic length distinction? /tama ː / ‘father’ vs. /tama/ ‘child’ /malu ː / ‘soft’ vs. /malu/ ‘shelter’

Pawley 1966 “Vowel length contrasts phonemically” but... “Long vowels are treated as consecutive identical vowels” “A long vowel has about the length of a [CV́CV] sequence or of two consecutive different vowels”

Phonetic Vowel Length Word final syllable Short VLong V Hovdhaugen (1992): msecs Condax (1990): msecs A phonetically long vowel is at least twice as long as a short vowel

This Study Participants –20 children; 14 girls and 6 boys –9 children 4;0-4;6, 11 children 4;7-4;11. –Attending full immersion ā’oga amata in Auckland –Mixed language backgrounds Some Samoan dominant Some English dominant

Picture naming task Targeting all Samoan phonemes 75 colour drawings of common objects Long vowels occurred at low frequency; no [i:], or [e] 1-1 elicitation by Samoan speaker minute session

Sample O le ā le mea lea? (what is this?) O le fetū (it’s a star)

Results: Vowel accuracy

Discussion No problems with short vowels –Almost 100% accuracy Performance on long vowels was inconsistent –Vowel quality was always accurate –8 children produced at least 1 example of an accurate long V. e.g. /mu ː mu ː / ‘red’, /fetu ː / ‘star’. –Only one child reached 70% accuracy for quantity on long vowels –Accuracy of all others was 40% or lower

Errors in quantity In comparison with adult speakers –children did not maintain a consistent difference between the long and the short vowels. –Children lengthened some vowels inappropriately [fo ː liŋa] for /foliŋa/ ‘face’

Child sample Cf. Adult long V / msecs Children’s long vowels are not long enough

Possible Factors Age, gender or social economic status (SES) Language dominance? Nature of the language input Phonemic status

Age, Gender & SES All children from same SES No significant difference between the two age groups Boys performed as well as the girls in all parts of the assessment

Language Dominance A factor in bilingual Welsh-English acquisition –‘r’ in Welsh was closer to English approximant than the Welsh trill. (Ball, Müller and Munro, 2006) English lacks phonemic vowel length, but average length of a stressed V is 132 msecs in English, (Klatt 1975) Similar to stressed short V in Samoan ( msecs) It is shorter than the shortest Samoan long vowel (147 msecs).

Samoan input Long vowels are infrequent in Samoan Minimal pairs distinguished by vowel length alone unlikely to occur in child’s environment – /pua ː / ‘shoal of bonito’ vs /pua/ ‘gardenia’ – /tina ː / ‘mother’ vs /tina/ ‘wedge’ Many minimal pairs come from different lexical classes, – /malu ː / ‘shelter’ is a noun – /malu/ ‘soft’ is an adjective.

Form and function of long vowels Long vowels are one unit at the segmental level But they are analysed as a sequence of identical short vowels (two units) for the purpose of stress assignment –(Mosel & Hovdhaugen 1992)

Stress assignment In most stems stress falls on the penultimate syllable - nonófo ‘sit’ (non singular) - váo ‘forest’ - vaóa ‘be overgrown with weeds’ If the final syllable is a long vowel, stress falls on that vowel - táma ‘boy’ - tamá: ‘father’ - tamá. a ‘father’

Observation In terms of learnability there is no clear one to one match between the segmental and the suprasegmental (subsyllabic) levels Very little is known about the interaction between the segmental and suprasegmental although it has been acknowledged as being a factor determining prosodic acquisition. (Kehoe & Stoel-Gammon 199 )

Summary The role that long vowels play in Samoan prosodic acquisition complicates their acquisition at the segmental level The lack of minimal pairs that are determined entirely by phonemic length also plays a role The English language environment with its own prosodic system (duration=stress) complicates acquisition even further

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Kehoe, M. and Stoel-Gammon, C. Klatt, D. H Vowel lengthening is syntactically determined in a connected discourse. Journal of phonetics 3: Pawley, A An outline of Samoan Phonology. Te Reo 3: Pratt, G Samoan dictionary: English and Samoan, and Samoan and English: with a short grammar of the Samoan dialect. Samoa: London Missionary Society’s Press. Statistics New Zealand Quick Stats about Culture and Identity. Wellington, Statistics New Zealand. Templin, M Certain language skills in children. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Zhu Hua, Dodd B Towards developmental universals. In Zhu Hua and Barbara Dodd (eds) Phonological development and disorders in children: a multilingual perspective. Clevedon, Multilingual Matters.