Revisiting the Acquisition of Onset Complexity: Affrication in Québec French
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I investigate the acquisition of affrication in Québec French (QF), where affricates are in complementary distribution with coronal stops, being realized before high front vowels and glides. Previous research on other languages shows that affricates are acquired before branching onsets, which supports the idea that complexity at the level of the segment is acquired before complexity at the level of the syllable (Lleó & Prinz, 1997). In contrast, I hypothesize that affricates are acquired after branching onsets in QF, as learners are required to understand the constraints on their distribution. I examine longitudinal data from two QF-speaking children for whom the acquisition of branching onsets has been previously analyzed (Rose, 2000). Results show that affricates are indeed acquired after branching onsets, consistent with the hypothesis. Overapplication errors indicate that children make generalizations about the phonological constraints on affrication from an early age, which is expected for the acquisition of rules.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".