The role of markedness in the acquisition of complex prosodic structures by German-Spanish bilinguals

Abstract

A tendency to limit prosodic words(PW) to the size of a metrical foot has often been acknowledged in early stages of acquisition and truncation has been shown to accomplish this size constraint. Interestingly, after the onefoot stage, children acquiring English or Dutch tend to enlargetheir productions by one foot, whereas at least for children acquiring Spanish, a stage, in which PWs comprise a foot preceded by an unfooted syllable, immediately follows the one-foot stage. Early productions(between 1;5 and 2;2/2;4) of children acquiring German and Spanish in monolingual and bilingual conditions constitute the empirical basis for this paper. The monolingual cross-linguistic results show quantitative differences between the truncation of the Spanishand German-speaking children and different ways in which these two groups of children overcome the size restriction and acquire complex words. These differences are accounted for within Optimality Theory, couched in Metrical Phonology, by means of two different grammars, that is, two different constraint hierarchies. The emergence of these different grammars is relevant for the analysis of the transition to complex prosodic structures in bilinguals and for the analysis of the relationships between their two phonological modules. An interaction of the two languages is found, the outcome of which is mainly attributed to markedness.