Green

I filmed this little video so I could demonstrate for one of my classes how V uses consonant clusters. Consonant clusters are any group of consonants sounds that occur together in a word. The word star, for example, starts with a consonant cluster (s+t). English has lots and lots of consonant clusters, but in many of the world’s languages, they don’t really occur. Many languages, such as Japanese, Hawaiian, even Finnish, pretty much have the word structure consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel (ie, CVCVCV, not CCVCC and so on).
In the video, V and I are talking about colors. What stands out the most to me, in terms of her pronunciation, is how her pronunciation of the word green varies pretty much each time she says it. In the first instance, she epenthesizes to break up the consonant cluster of the g and the r. That’s just a fancy way of saying that she adds a vowel: she says ‘gah-reen.’ The next time says green, it comes out ‘geen,’ without the r. The next time she says green, she very carefully articulates the r, so it comes out right on target, with the g+r consonant cluster intact. The next two times, however, she pronounces it ‘geen.’
OK, so why am I going on about consonant clusters, right? In the reading I was doing to prepare for my class, it was reported that kids don’t master consonant clusters in English until they are about three years old. Here is a nice little example of how V, age 2 and a half years, is working out the kinks. She has a couple of different strategies for dealing with that unwieldy consonant cluster in the word green: she epenthesizes, she leaves out the r, and one time, she totally nails it. Soon, she’ll be able to pronounce it on target every time, so this is like a little mini progress report.