The impact of anatomical transformations on the acquisition of sounds by infants remains poorly understood. Using the Variable Linear Articulator? Model, we simulate vowel production in the course of non-uniform vocal tract growth. Production abilities related to vocal tract growth are described by simulating French vowels, generated by assuming that sensori-motor control abilities are identical in newborns and adults. Despite small vocal tract size, an infant is able to produce all the vowels of its first language. The recurrence of certain units in the babbling inventory is attributable to motor control immaturity and cognitive abilities. Simulation of articulatory fibers provides a more accurate view of the relation between articulatory strategies and acoustic targets. The results highlight differences relative to labial and lingual articulators.

Lexical borrowings provide important clues regarding the internal structure of segments. We focus on the internal structure of the front rounded vowel /y/ and the arguments which led us to maintain that /y/ is a simple vowel. The unpacking of /y/ in /ju/ in many Russian borrowings from French, German, and several languages of the Turkish family is not the consequence of /y/ including two vowels underlyingly but the consequence of the fact that Russian allows the majority of its consonants to be palatalized. The front rounded vowel /y/ includes the feature combination [−back] ~ [+round]. When an adaptation strategy causes [—back] to delink from /y/ in Russian, [—back] is salvaged by the preceding consonant when this consonant is palatalizable, thus yielding the realization /Cju/.