This paper focuses on the development of Prosodic Word shapes in Catalan, a language which differs from both Spanish and English in the distribution of PW structures. Of particular interest are the truncations of initial unstressed syllables, and how these develop over time. Developmental qualitative and quantitative data from seven Catalan-speaking children reveal that maximality constraints are active at two stages, namely, the moraic trochee stage, and the bisyllabic foot stage. One of the noteworthy differences between Catalan and Spanish is the rate of acquisition of weak initial syllables in WS words, as Catalan learners omit initial syllables in WS target iambs for a significantly longer time than Spanish learners, despite the fact that Catalan is a language where the bisyllabic iambic WS pattern is more frequent than in Spanish. We claim that this asymmetry in the course of development of PWs can be attributed to the frequency of exposure to different metrical models. In Catalan (and also in English), the high
Anderson, J., Morgan, J., & White, K. (2003). A statistical basis for speech sound discrimination. Language and Speech (Special issue on phonological acquisition), 2-3, 155 - 182.
2.
Cabré Monné, T. (1993). Estructura gramatical i lexicó: El mot mínim català . Ph.D. Dissertation, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona .
3.
Demuth, K. (1996a). Stages in the development of prosodic words. In E. Clark (Ed.), Proceedings from the 27th Child Language Research Forum. Stanford University : CSLI.
4.
Demuth, K. (1996b). The prosodic structure of early words. In J. Morgan & K. Demuth (Eds.), Signal to syntax: Bootstrapping from speech to grammar in early acquisition (pp. 171-184). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
5.
Demuth, K. (2001a). A prosodic approach to filler syllables. Journal of Child Language, 28, 246 - 249.
6.
Demuth, K. (2001b). Prosodic constraints on morphological development . In J. Weissenborn & B. Höhle (Eds.), Approaches to bootstrapping: Phonological, syntactic and neurophysiological aspects of early language acquisition (pp.3-21). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
7.
Demuth, K. (2003). The status of feet in early acquisition. In M. J. Solé, D. Recasens & J. Romero (Eds.), Proceedings of the XVth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, vol. 1 (pp. 151-154). Barcelona: Causal Productions.
8.
Demuth, K., & Fee, J.E. (1995). Minimal words in early phonological development. Ms. Brown University andDalhousie University.
9.
Demuth, K., & Johnson, M. (2003). Truncation to subminimal words in early French . Canadian Journal of Linguistics, 48, (Special issue on segmental/prosodic interactions), 211-241.
10.
Fikkert, P. (1994). On the acquisition of prosodic structure. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Institute of Generative Linguistics.
11.
Gennari, S., & Demuth, K. (1997). Syllable omission in Spanish. In E. M. Hughes & A. Green (Eds.), Proceedings of the 21st Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 182-193). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
12.
Guasti, M.T., & Gavarró, A. (2003). Catalan as a test for hypotheses concerning article omission. In B. Beachley, A. Brown, & F. Conlin (Eds.), Proceedings of the 27th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp.288-298). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
13.
Guasti, T.de Lange, J., Gavarró, A., & Caprin, C. (2004). Article omission: Across child languages and across special registers. In J. van Kampen & S. Baauw (Eds.), Proceedings, of GALA 2003 (pp.199-210). Utrecht: LOT.
14.
Kehoe, M. (1999/2000). Truncation without shape constraints: The latter stages of prosodic acquisition. Language Acquisition , 8, 23-67.
15.
Levelt, C., Schiller, N., & Levelt, W. (1999/2000). The acquisition of syllable types. Language Acquisition, 8, 237-264.
16.
Lleó, C. (2002). The role of markedness in the acquisition of complex prosodic structures by German-Spanish bilinguals. International Journal of Bilingualism, 6, 291-313.
17.
Lleó, C. (2003). The acquisition of coda consonants in Spanish . Probus, 15, 257-281.
18.
Lleó, C., & Demuth, K. (1999). Prosodic constraints on the emergence of grammatical morphemes: Crosslinguistic evidence from Germanic and Romance languages. In A. Greenhill, H. Littlefield & Ch. Tano (Eds.), Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp.407-418). Somerville, MACascadilla Press.
19.
Lleó, C., Kuchenbrandt, I., Kehoe, M., Trujillo, C. (2003). Syllable final consonants in Spanish and German monolingual and bilingual acquisition. In N. Müller (Ed.), (In)vulnerable domains in multilingualism . Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 191-220.
20.
MacWhinney, B., & Snow, C. (1985). The Child Language Data Exchange System. Journal of Child Language, 12, 271-296.
21.
Ota, M. ( 2003). The development of prosodic structure in early words . Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
22.
Pater, J. (1997). Minimal violation and phonological development . Language Acquisition, 6(3), 201-253.
23.
Prieto, P. (1992). Truncation processes in Spanish. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences, 22, 143 - 158.
24.
Prieto, P., & Bosch-Baliarda, M. (forthcoming). The development of codas in Catalan. Catalan Journal of Linguistics, 6, (Special issue on The Acquisition of Romance, edited by A. Gavarró and C. Lleó).
25.
Prieto, P., Bosch-Baliarda, M., & Saceda-Ulloa, M. (2005). The development of codas in Catalan and Spanish: Frequency effects in specific contexts. Xth International Congress for the Study of Child Language. Berlin, July 25-29, 2005.
26.
Roark, B., & Demuth, K. (2000). Prosodic constraints and the learner's environment: A corpus study. In S. C. Howell, S. A. Fish, & T. Keith-Lucas (Eds.), Proceedings of the 24th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 597-608), Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
27.
Rose, Y. (2000). Headedness and prosodic licensing in the L1 acquisition of phonology. Ph.D. Dissertation. McGill University.
28.
Rose, Y., Byrne, R., Wareham, H., Hedlund, G., & O'Brien, P. (2005). Phon: A tool for transcription and analysis of phonological corpora. Unpublished manuscript. Memorial University of Newfoundland.
29.
Saceda-Ulloa, M. (2005). Adquisición prosódica en español peninsular: La sílaba y la palabra prosódica. M.A. Thesis. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
30.
Saffran, J.R., & Thiessen, E.D. (2003). Pattern induction by infant language learners. Developmental Psychology, 39, 484-494.
31.
Salidis, J., & Johnson, J.S. (1997). The production of minimal words: A longitudinal case study of phonological development. Language Acquisition , 6(1), 1-36. < http://seneca.uab.es/ggt/tesis.htm>
32.
Vihman, M., DePaolis, R.A., & Davis, B.L. (1998). Is there a "Trochaic Bias" in early word learning? Evidence from infant production in English and French. Child Development, 69,935-949.
33.
Zamuner, T.S., Gerken, L., & Hammond, M. (2004). Phonotactic probabilities in young children's speech production. Journal of Child Language, 31, 515-536.
