Young children simplify word initial consonant clusters by omitting or substituting one (or both) of the elements. Vocalic insertion, coalescence and metathesis are said to be used more seldom (McLeod, van Doorn & Reed, 2001). Data from Norwegian children, however, have shown vocalic insertion to be more frequently used (Simonsen, 1990; Simonsen, Garmann & Kristoffersen, 2019). To investigate the extent to which children use this strategy to differing degrees depending on the ambient language, we analysed word initial cluster production acoustically in nine Norwegian and nine English speaking children aged 2;6–6 years, and eight adults, four from each language. The results showed that Norwegian-speaking children produce significantly more instances of vocalic insertions than English-speaking children do. The same pattern is found in Norwegian- versus English-speaking adults. We argue that this cross-linguistic difference is an example of the influence of prosodic-phonetic biases in language-specific developmental paths in the acquisition of speech.

中文翻译：

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成人和儿童语言中词首聚类产生的跨语言变异：来自英语和挪威语的证据

幼儿通过省略或替换一个（或两个）元素来简化单词初始辅音簇。据说很少使用人声插入、合并和复分解 (McLeod, van Doorn & Reed, 2001)。然而，来自挪威儿童的数据显示，更频繁地使用声音插入（Simonsen，1990；Simonsen，Garmann & Kristoffersen，2019）。为了调查儿童根据环境语言在不同程度上使用这种策略的程度，我们分析了 9 名挪威语和 9 名 2 岁；6-6 岁的英语儿童和 8 名成人（每种语言各 4 名）的单词初始聚类生成声学. 结果表明，说挪威语的儿童比说英语的儿童产生更多的声音插入实例。在说挪威语和说英语的成年人中发现了相同的模式。我们认为，这种跨语言差异是韵律语音偏差对语言习得的语言特定发展路径影响的一个例子。