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The prosodic (re)organization of children's early English articles*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2008

KATHERINE DEMUTH  and
ELIZABETH McCULLOUGH
KATHERINE DEMUTH*
Affiliation:
Brown University, USA
ELIZABETH McCULLOUGH
Affiliation:
Brown University, USA
*
Address for correspondence: Katherine Demuth, Brown University, 190 Thayer Street, Providence, RI 02912, United States. e-mail: Katherine_Demuth@brown.edu
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Abstract

Researchers have long been puzzled by children's variable omission of grammatical morphemes, often attributing this to a lack of semantic or syntactic competence. Recent studies suggest that some of this variability may be due to phonological constraints. This paper explored this issue further by conducting a longitudinal study of five English-speaking one- to two-year-olds' acquisition of articles. It found that most children were more likely to produce articles when these could be produced as part of a disyllabic foot. However, acoustic analysis revealed that one child initially produced all articles as independent prosodic words. These findings confirm that some of the variable production of articles is conditioned by constraints on children's early phonologies, providing further support for the Prosodic Licensing Hypothesis. They also hold important implications for our understanding of the emergence of syntactic knowledge.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , January 2009 , pp. 173 - 200
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

*

Previous versions of this paper have been presented at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the MIT Speech Group, the GALANA-2, the University of Washington, the University of California at Berkeley, GURT '07, Oregon Health & Science University, and the Boston University Conference on Language Development. We thank those audiences as well as Theres Grüter, Aafke Hulk, Karen Jesney, Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel, Mark Johnson, Kenneth Stevens, Megha Sundara, Annie Tremblay and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and discussion, and Matt Adamo and Jae Yung Song for research assistance. This research has been supported by NIH Grant #R01MH60922.

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