Subsyllabic Structures in Japanese Child Phonology : A Preliminary Study

要旨

In many languages, we observe that children go through a developmental stage in which their utterances are limited to a certain prosodic maximum. In English, for example, there can be a developmental stage in which children's utterances are limited to a trochaic foot (e.g. spaghetti → [gɛ:.di]: Pater 1997). Ota (1999) points out that Japanese children go through a stage in which they show disyllabic maximum. This paper reports on a closer examination of Ota’s (1999) data, and shows that within disyllabic forms, some syllable structures are more preferred over others; concretely, there may be preference toward Heavy-Light (HL) and Light-Light (LL) forms over Heavy-Heavy (HH) and Light-Heavy (LH) forms. The results show that subsyllabic structures play a non-trivial role in determining the outputs of child phonology in Japanese.

主題