Resumen de The acquisition of spanish codas: a frequency / sonority approach

Rafael Antonio Núñez Cedeño

• The coda has attracted the attention of many acquisition researchers. They maintain that its development responds to considerable variability. Recent studies show that Spanish-speaking children acquire medial codas in stressed syllables before producing final ones. They also develop sonorants before obstruents and acquire the plural /-s/ before /s/. The present study shows that prosody alone does not determine the codas that occur in Spanish. Instead, it claims that sonorant and fricative distributions in a syllable are tied to their frequency of production and relative prominence in the universal sonority hierarchy. Medial and final codas tend to develop at about the same time. It appears that there is no distinction between the acquisition of /-s/ and final /s/. The fi-equent occurrences of medial nasal in codas are explained as being licensed by a follovving onset.