Is There a "Trochaic Bias" in Early Word Learning? Evidence from Infant Production in English and French

Abstract

Studies of speech perception and segmentation in the prelinguistic period, early word production, and patterns of function word omission in early syntax have all recently emphasized the role of the trochaic accentual pattern in English, sometimes positing a universal trochaic bias. We make use of perceptual and acoustic analyses of words and babble from 9 children acquiring English and 5 acquiring French in the late single-word period (13-20 months) to provide a direct test for the existence of such a bias. Neither English nor French infant vocalizations were exclusively trochaic. The iambic productions of American infants were traced to the presence of iambic phrases in the input. Differences between English and French in the acoustic realization of accent in infant vocalizations were also traceable to adult patterns. However, the almost bipolar distribution of trochaic and iambic patterns in the data from English-learning infants was ultimately traceable to the integration of prosodic and segmental patterning in individual child word production templates, themselves arguably the product of an earlier acting articulatory filter.

Segmental and suprasegmental properties in nonword repetition – An explorative study of the associations with nonword decoding in children with normal hearing and children with bilateral cochlear implants

“…The interpretation is that phonotactic knowledge influenced performance. In the present study the children inserted a vowel in between the consonants in the phonotactically illegal cluster to adapt it to Swedish phonotactic rules, as also has been reported for English-speaking children by Pitt (1998) and Vihman, DePaolis, and Davis (1998). This is also a process that occurs in consonant cluster acquisition in spontaneous speech in typically developing Swedish children (Nettelbladt, 2007).…”

Contributions of infant word learning to language development

“…This pattern of favouring trochees is also evident, with some variation among children, in English learners' early word productions (e.g. McGregor & Johnson 1997) in contrast to French learners' largely iambic productions (Vihman et al 1998), suggesting learning of language-specific production templates based on characteristic patterns in the words children hear.…”

Tonal Targets in Early Child English, Spanish, and Catalan

“…Because of the tendency for young children to simplify complex codas (Gerken, 1994;Vihman et al, 1998) English: 9 words (sun, train, moon, angel, monkey, giraffe, balloon, violin, helicopter) Spanish: 10 words (sol, tren, bus, camión, león, caracol, pantalón, violín, elefante, helicóptero) Catalan: 7 words (sol, tren, bus, taxi [tak-si], cocodril, elefant, helicòpter)…”