Constraints of Prosodic and Morphological Development

人们早就注意到，儿童在早期说话时往往会省略音节。尽管关于这种现象发生的原因已经提出了一些建议，但没有一个能准确地捕捉到英语或跨语言的数据，也没有提供一个关于儿童早期单词形状如何随着时间变化的发展解释。相比之下，从统计学和音系学的角度来看待这些问题，采用韵律音系学和优化理论的见解，并考虑输入，可以更好地实现数据的经验覆盖。它还提供了一个理论上更连贯的理解，为什么孩子会省略音节（或音节的一部分），孩子如何最终达到更像成年人的语言产物，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早期韵律音韵学和形态学的连贯发展理论。要研究的语言是英语和法语，这两种语言的韵律和形态结构非常不同。这项研究有三个目标：第一个目标是对12名儿童从开始说话到大约3岁的自发语言产生进行纵向案例研究。第二个目标是设计一套复杂的语言实验程序，用于测试儿童的韵律发展水平。实验将对横断面和纵向受试者进行。这两组数据都将在音节、脚、韵律词和语音短语的层面上进行细致的语言分析，并辅以声学分析。第三个目标是从最优性理论的定量角度来处理行为数据。这将通过使用随机排序约束和条件指数模型来评估数据中的统计变化来实现。所开发的纵向数据、实验工具和统计方法将对未来正常和语言障碍人群的研究具有宝贵的价值，并将在探索语言变化的定量方法方面开辟新的领域。

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.