The goal of this study is to examine the acquisition of prosody at the word level in early child Catalan, Spanish and English. We used a controlled naming task to elicit speech from 36 children; 12 English, 12 Catalan, and 12 Spanish, aged 2, 4 and 6 in order to analyze the acquisition of prosodic words with increasingly complex forms (S, WS, SW, WSW, SWW, WWS, SWSW; 3 target words per prosodic pattern in each language). We analyzed the prosodic patterns produced and quantified the omissions ("truncations") of weakly stressed syllables. Results are in line with previous studies [1],[2] in that there are developmental and crosslinguistic differences in the acquisition of complex prosodic word structures.
Index Terms: prosodic word, first language acquisition metrical patterns, rhythm, Catalan, Spanish, English.
s Lleó, C. & Demuth, K. (1999). Prosodic constraints on the emergence of grammatical morphemes: Crosslinguistic evidence from Germanic and Romance languages. Proceedings 23rd BUCLD, 407-418. Prieto, P. (2006). The relevance of metrical information in early prosodic word acquisition: A comparison of Catalan and Spanish. Language and Speech, 49, 231-259.
Cite as: Astruc, L., Payne, E., Post, B., Prieto, P., Vanrell, M.d.M. (2010) Word prosody in early child Catalan, Spanish and English. Proc. Speech Prosody 2010, paper 173
@inproceedings{astruc10_speechprosody,
author={Lluïsa Astruc and Elinor Payne and Brechtje Post and Pilar Prieto and Maria del Mar Vanrell},
title={{Word prosody in early child Catalan, Spanish and English}},
year=2010,
booktitle={Proc. Speech Prosody 2010},
pages={paper 173}
}