This monograph addresses three basic questions regarding the development of word-internal prosodic structure: How much of the phonological structure of early words is regulated by the same constituents and principles that govern the organization of prosodic structure of mature grammar? Why do early words diverge from the adult targets in shape and size? And what is the best way to model developmental changes that occur in prosodic structure? Answers to these questions are explored through the longitudinal analysis of spontaneous production data from child Japanese. The analysis provides new types of evidence and new arguments that the prosodic phonology of young children is largely continuous with that of adults, and that the surface child-adult divergence in word forms and the overall pattern of developmental changes are best explained in terms of ranked violable constraints on the representation of prosodic structure, whose ordering is modified in the course of acquisition.

Prosodic development is increasingly recognized as a fundamental stepping stone in first language acquisition. Prosodic sensitivity starts developing very early, with newborns becoming attuned to the prosodic properties of the ambient language, and it continues to develop during childhood until early adolescence. In the last decades, a flourishing literature has reported on the varied set of prosodic skills that children acquire and how they interact with other linguistic and cognitive skills. This book compiles a set of seventeen short review chapters from distinguished experts that have contributed significantly to our knowledge about how prosody develops in first language acquisition. The ultimate aim of the book is to offer a complete state of the art on prosodic development that allows the reader to grasp the literature from an interdisciplinary and critical perspective. This volume will be of interest to scholars and students of psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, speech therapy, and education.

This book provides a comprehensive yet succinct overview of research on prosodic development, uniting phonetic, phonological, and clinical approaches to the topic. It brings together diverse research findings on prosodic perception, prosodic production, the development of prosodic structure, and prosodic disorders in clinical populations.

This handbook presents detailed accounts of current research in all aspects of language prosody, written by leading experts from different disciplines. The volume's comprehensive coverage and multidisciplinary approach will make it an invaluable resource for all researchers, students, and practitioners interested in prosody.

This volume gathers fifty papers from the conference Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition, GALA 2007, celebrated in Barcelona between the 6th and 8th of September, 2007. It covers the areas of syntax and phonology of child language from the theoretical perspective of generative grammar – the theoretical outlook which first placed language acquisition at the centre of linguistic inquiry.

The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Phonology brings together leading experts in Spanish phonology to provide a state-of-the-art survey of the field. The five sections present current research on the phonological structure of Spanish including the most prominent segmental processes, suprasegmental features, the ways Spanish phonology interacts with other modules of grammar, the acquisition of Spanish phonology by first and second language learners, and an analysis of phonological variation and sound change. This volume provides comprehensive and detailed coverage of Spanish phonology. It addresses major burning questions and pressing issues that have arisen in the study of Spanish phonology, and is an essential reading resource for graduate students and researchers in the field.

The volume addresses developing knowledge and use of Hebrew from the dual perspective of typologically specific factors and of shared cross-linguistic trends, aimed at providing an overview of acquisition in a single language from infancy to adolescence while also shedding light on key issues in the field as a whole. Essentially non-partisan in approach, the collection includes distinct approaches to language and language acquisition (formal-universalist, pragmatic-usage based, cognitive-constructivist) and deals with a range of topics not often addressed within a single volume (phonological perception and production, inflectional and derivational morphology, simple-clause structure and complex syntax, early and later literacy, writing systems), with data deriving from varied research methodologies (interactive conversations and extended discourse, adult input and child output, longitudinal and cross-sectional corpora, structured elicitations). Each chapter provides background information on Hebrew-specific facets of the topic of concern, but typically avoids ethno-centricity by relating to more general issues in the domain. The book should thus prove interesting and instructive for linguists, psychologists, and educators, and for members of the child language research community both within and beyond the confines of Hebrew-language expertise.