Prosodic structure in phonological acquisition

This article discusses the acquisition of the prosodic characteristics of a second language in the light of the development of a target language phonological grammar. Prosodic characteristics are conventionally taken to refer to the intonation and accent patterns in a phonological system. However, nonlinear theories of phonology view the pitch and stress values of a language as defining a separate representation or component in a phonological grammar, i.e. the prosodic structure. A 'metrical' type model of prosodic structure is presented, in which the structural layers of a phonological hierarchy are characterized by the occurrence of particular contrastive (paradigmatic) features and particular phonetic (syntagmatic) effects at each unit-level. The course of acquisition of the prosodic structure of a second language is then shown to be describable in terms of the gradual development of target language values per unit-level of the hierarchy. Data from the L2 English of two L 1 Dutch speakers are examined by way of illustrating some of the claims of the model.