Phonological Acquisition and Dutch Word Prosody

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

This article presents the results of an investigation into the acquisition of syllable structure and stress by one Dutch child, Joost, between age 1;8 and 2;11. In the first half of the article we show how the structure of the child' s output approaches the adult models in stages. Our findings rely to a considerable extent (and therefore confirm) the current parametric account of Dutch wordstress. The latter theory provides representations that, to a striking degree, are adequate for a description of three acquisitional stages in our data: monosyllabic words, polysyllabic words, and words containing the accurate adult number of syllables. Output such as [nat], [ojnat], and [ojinat] for o1ifant represent precisely these three stages. The first of these examples shows that the child is right-oriented in his monosyllabic stage, selecting rightmost stressed (gridmarked) syllables. Words then become longer by the addition of further syllables that are gridmarked in the metrical representations. Finally, the adult stage is reached in which all target syllables are represented. The second part of this article concerns a phenomenon we call mutation. In mutation, all continuants are consistently replaced with n- in onsets. We show how this phenomenon depends on both syllable structure and stress, discuss the possible role of exhaustive footing and strict binarity of feet, and present evidence for the view that its details provide support for a Stress-to-Weight principle, which is currently under discussion in the metrical literature.