Constraints of Prosodic and Morphological Development

人们早就注意到，儿童在早期讲话时往往会省略音节。虽然已经提出了几个建议，为什么会发生这种情况，没有准确地捕捉无论是英语或跨语言的数据，他们也没有提供一个发展帐户的儿童的早期单词形状如何随着时间的推移而变化。与此相反，统计学和语音学的角度对这些问题，采用韵律语音学和优选理论的见解，沿着考虑的输入，实现更好的经验覆盖的数据。它还提供了一个更理论上连贯的理解，为什么儿童省略音节（或音节的一部分），他们做的，儿童如何最终达到更像成人的言语生产，以及这对语法功能语素的出现的影响。该项目的主要重点是提供一个连贯的早期韵律语音和形态发展理论。要研究的语言是英语和法语-具有非常不同的韵律和形态结构的语言。这项研究有三个目标：第一个目标是进行纵向个案研究的12名儿童的自发言语生产从开始讲话，直到3岁左右。第二个目标是设计一套语言学上复杂的实验程序来测试儿童的韵律发展水平。这些实验将对横向和纵向受试者进行管理。这两组数据将受到细粒度的语言分析，辅以声学分析，在音节，脚，韵律词和音韵短语的水平上儿童的早期语音产品。第三个目标是在优选论中从定量的角度处理行为数据。这将通过使用随机排序约束和条件指数模型评价数据的统计变异来进行。纵向数据，实验工具和统计方法的发展将是非常宝贵的正常和语言障碍人群的未来研究，并将开辟新的天地，在探索定量方法语言变异。

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.