15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15) Barcelona, Spain August 3-9, 2003

The Status of Feet in Early Acquisition

Katherine Demuth

Brown University, USA

Previous study of children's early productions finds a stage of development where words are minimally and maximally a binary foot, or minimal word. The present study finds extensive truncation of early words to CV subminimal words in the speech of a French-speaking child, posing problems for such proposals. The paper shows how these findings can be accounted for within a theory of prosodic constraints that is sensitive to the statistics of language-specific prosodic word structures.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Demuth, Katherine (2003): "The status of feet in early acquisition", In ICPhS-15, 151-154.