The Acquisition of Prosodic Structure: An Investigation of Current Accounts of Children's Prosodic Development

Abstract

This article examines four different approaches to prosodic acquisition: Gerken's S(W) production template; Fikkert's and Archibald's theories of stress acquisition, and Demuth and Fee's prosodic hierarchy account. The predictions of prosodic circumscription, template mapping, and development according to the stages of the prosodic hierarchy are evaluated using a database of English-speaking children's multisyllabic word productions. The results show that current approaches are unable to account for robust findings in the data such as the increased preservation of final over nonfinal unstressed syllables, segmental and prominence effects on truncation rate, and the relative infrequency of epenthesis and stress error patterns. Findings reveal a complex interaction between prominence, edge-based factors, and segmental effects in phonological development. The discussion explores how these findings may be accounted for within a constraint-based theoretical framework. *