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The Development of Prosody in First Language Acquisition
Edited by Pilar Prieto and Núria Esteve-Gibert
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 23] 2018
► pp. 165–184

Chapter 9
Prosodic phonology in acquisition

A focus on children’s early word productions

| University of Geneva

This chapter investigates how the theory of prosodic phonology has been applied to child language data, focusing on children’s early words. First, we consider early accounts of prosodic structure development in which the tools of prosodic phonology were used to explain the shape of children’s word productions. We then go on to consider later accounts in which factors apart from prosodic structure, such as the frequency of input forms, perceptual bias, and segmental factors, have been integrated into recent models. Referring to findings on a wide range of languages (e.g., Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Hebrew, Greek, and Japanese) we examine support for the minimal word, a bimoraic constraint on word production, and compare prosodic structure development across different groups of languages.

Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Theory of prosodic phonology
  • Prosodic phonology in acquisition
  • Early accounts of prosodic structure development
    • Gerken’s S(W) production template
    • Fikkert’s (1994) model of stress acquisition
    • Demuth and Fee’s (1995) prosodic hierarchy account
  • Later accounts of prosodic structure development
    • Factors influencing word shape apart from prosodic structure
      • Frequency of input forms
      • Perceptual bias or acoustic prominence
      • Segmental factors
    • Minimal word constraint
    • Prosodic structure development
      • Findings on Germanic languages
      • Findings on “Romance and other” languages
      • Prosodic structure development: Final word.
    • Top-down versus bottom-up development
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 24 May 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.23.09keh
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