Constraints of Prosodic and Morphological Development

长期以来，人们一直注意到，儿童在早期讲话时往往会省略音节。尽管有人提出了几种解释这种现象的方法，但没有一种方法能够准确地捕捉到英语或跨语言的数据，也没有一种方法能够解释儿童早期词形是如何随着时间的推移而变化的。相反，从统计学和音韵学的角度来看待这些问题，结合韵律音位学和优选论的见解，并考虑输入，可以更好地对数据进行实证研究。它也提供了一个理论上更连贯的理解，为什么儿童省略了他们所做的音节(或部分音节)，儿童是如何最终产生更像成人的言语产出的，以及这对语法功能语素的出现有何影响。该项目的主要焦点是为早期韵律音系学和词汇学提供一个连贯的发展理论。要调查的语言是英语和法语--韵律和形态结构非常不同的语言。这项研究有三个目标：第一个目标是对12名儿童从说话开始到大约3岁的自发言语产生进行纵向案例研究。第二个目标是设计一套语言上复杂的实验程序，旨在测试儿童的韵律发展水平。这些实验将同时对横截面和纵向受试者进行。这两组数据都将经过细粒度的语言分析，并辅以声学分析，在音节、音步、韵律单词和音位短语的水平上对儿童的早期言语产出进行分析。第三个目标是在最优理论中从定量的角度处理行为数据。这将通过使用统计排序约束和条件指数模型来评估数据的统计变化来实现。所开发的纵向数据、实验工具和统计方法将对未来对正常人群和语言障碍人群的研究具有非常重要的价值，并将在探索语言变异的定量方法方面开辟新的天地。

It has long been noted that children tend to omit syllables in their early speech. Although several proposals have been made as to why this occurs, none accurately captures either the English or crosslinguistic data, nor do they provide a developmental account for how children's early word shapes change over time. In contrast, a statistically and phonologically grounded perspective on these issues, employing insights from Prosodic Phonology and Optimality Theory along with consideration of the input, achieves better empirical coverage of the data. It also provides a more theoretically coherent understanding for why children omit the syllables (or parts of syllables) they do, how children eventually arrive at more adult-like speech productions, and the implications this holds for the emergence of grammatical function morphemes. The main focus of the project is to provide a coherent developmental theory of early prosodic phonology and morphology. The languages to be investigated are English and French - languages with very different prosodic and morphological structures. The study has three goals: The first goal is to conduct longitudinal case studies of 12 children's spontaneous speech productions from the onset of speech until around 3 years of age. The second goal is to design a set of linguistically sophisticated experimental procedures designed to test children's level of prosodic development. The experiments will be administered to both cross-sectional and longitudinal subjects. Both sets of data will be subject to fine-grained linguistic analysis, supplemented with acoustic analysis, of children's early speech productions at the level of Syllables, Feet, Prosodic Words, and Phonological Phrases. The third goal is to address the behavioral data from a quantitative perspective within Optimality Theory. This will be carried out by evaluating statistical variation in the data using both stochasitically ranked constraints and conditional exponential models. The longitudinal data, experimental tools and statistical methods developed will be invaluable for future study of both normal and language impaired populations, and will break new ground in exploring quantitative approaches to language variation.