The Production of Minimal Words: A Longitudinal Case Study of Phonological Development

Abstract

Two developmental models incorporating recent innovations in prosodic theory were evaluated using the phonological forms of 1 child's vocabulary documented in its entirety for the first 9 months of his language production (10 to 20 months of age). The data support the proposal (Demuth and Fee (1995)) that there is a period of development characterized by the production of minimal words, the unmarked prosodic word defined by McCarthy and Prince (1986). The data do not provide evidence for certain aspects of the second model (Fikkert (1994)), which specifies universal parameters that define the acquisition of subsyllabic structure because there was very little development shown in the relevant aspects of syllable structure. The observed trends were due more to increasing segmental competence than to restricted syllable templates. Results indicate the relevance of the prosodic hierarchy in the early grammar as well as considerable early knowledge of prosodic structure below the word level.