This study analyses the scaling and alignment of low and high intonational targets in the speech of 27 children--nine English-speaking, nine Catalan-speaking and nine Spanish-speaking--between the ages of two and six years. We compared the intonational patterns of words controlled for number of syllables and stress position in the child speech to…

Interval-based rhythm metrics were applied to the speech of English, Catalan and Spanish 2, 4 and 6 year-olds, and compared with the (adult-directed) speech of their mothers. Results reveal that child speech does not fall into a well-defined rhythmic class: for all three languages, it is more "vocalic" (higher %V) than adult speech and…

This paper focuses on the development of Prosodic Word shapes in Catalan, a language which differs from both Spanish and English in the distribution of PW structures. Of particular interest are the truncations of initial unstressed syllables, and how these develop over time. Developmental qualitative and quantitative data from seven…

This paper investigates the acquisition of prosodic words in European Portuguese (EP) through analysis of grammatical and statistical properties of the target language and child speech. The analysis of grammatical properties shows that there are solid cues to the prosodic word (PW) in EP, and the presence of early word-based phonology in child…