Markedness and the Development of Prosodic Structure

It has long been noted that children's early words are truncated in form, and that those forms show a certain degree of variability in shape. In this paper I show how the prosodic development of children's early words can be naturally accounted for in terms of prosodic constraints on output form. Critically, I assume that children's segmental representations of lexical items are full from the beginning, but that early emergence of unmarked prosodic structures (e.g. Core Syllables and Minimal Words), combined with the low initial ranking of PARSE conspire to yield early word structures that differ from adult target forms in a principled manner. I conclude by showing how a given constraint ranking can provide an account of variability in form at a given point in time, whereas a shift in constraint ranking is needed to account for development over time. In so doing, I demonstrate how the process of language acquisition can be thought of as an optimization problem, and how OT might be adapted to provide for a theory of both competence and performance.The definitive version of this paper was published in NELS 25: Proceedings of the North East Linguistics Society and is available at http://glsa.hypermart.netDemuth, K. (1995). Markedness and the development of prosodic structure. In J.N. Beckman (Ed.), NELS 25: Proceedings of the North East Linguistics Society (pp. 13-25). Amherst, MA: GLSA (Graduate Linguistic Student Association), Dept. of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts