Faithfulness vs truncation: A prosodic account of children’s disyllabic to pentasyllabic words

Abstract

In the present study faithfulness and truncation in language acquisition are investigated. The data come from pictures naming and spontaneous speech produced by four Greek-speaking children aged 1;6.26 to 2;10.9 years old. Our hypotheses are based on words containing two to five syllables. From the beginning of the research only disyllabic words remain faithful to the number of syllables, while the remaining words are initially truncated and are gradually uttered more and more accurate as children’s linguistic development proceeds. Words with faithfulness are not affected by the position of stress and type of rhythm. In truncations, the stressed syllable is maintained in the majority of cases. Generally, rhythm remains stable, even in tokens where the stressed syllable is omitted. Truncations also show that children construct their words from strong to weak elements, namely, from stressed syllable and strong foot to weak foot or syllable. Our analysis is couched in Optimality Theory framework (Prince & Smolensky, 1993), while for the different patterns observed in children’s tokens we rely on Multiple Parallel Grammars model (Revithiadou & Tzakosta, 2004), where different rankings of the same constraints relative to prosody and structure of prosodic word can interpret the aforementioned observations.