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Prosodic Structure in Young Children's Language Production

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Lou Ann Gerken
Lou Ann Gerken*
Affiliation:
University of Arizona
*
Department of Speech and, Hearing Sciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721 [gerken@ccit.arizona.edu]
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Abstract

Research in prosodic phonology, as well as experiments on adult speech production, suggest that segmental and suprasegmental processes in language are not governed directly by syntactic structure. Rather these processes reflect an independent prosodic structure, which includes prosodic categories such as metrical foot, prosodic word, and phonological phrase. Five experiments examined English-speaking two-year-olds' omissions of object articles in different prosodic structures. The data indicate that children omit unfooted syllables and that foot boundaries, in turn, are influenced by prosodic word and phonological phrase boundaries. Thus, it appears that children create prosodic structures remarkably similar to those proposed in theories of prosodic phonology.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 72 , Issue 4 , December 1996 , pp. 683 - 712
Copyright
Copyright © 1996 Linguistic Society of America

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