Morpheme-realization conditioned by early prosodic structure: A production study with German and German-Italian children

Gwinner, A. , Engert, B. & Grijzenhout, J.

University of Konstanz

At first sight, the production of weak syllables in early child speech seems to be random. However, English children seem to realize weak syllables first in environments where these can be parsed into trochaic feet (e.g., Gerken 1994, 1996). So far, bilingual acquisition of two languages with different rhythmic preferences and with different grammatical structures has been understudied with respect to children?s early realizations of morphemes. Italian differs from both English and German in that it exhibits a broader prosodic spectrum. In comparison to English, German functional elements contain more grammatical information (e.g., gender, number, case). By investigating German monolingual acquisition and German-Italian bilingual acquisition, we aim to disentangle the contribution of prosodic biases and the contribution of grammatical load on the acquisition of weak syllables. We use an elicited imitation method and our experimental design includes the following variables: - rhythm (trochaic sentences versus sentences with a stress lapse) - grammatical information expressed by weak syllables (definite articles with three different genders, a past participle prefix and noun-initial weak syllables) - language background (thirty German and fifteen German-Italian children, aged 1;10-6;4). We find that at an early stage, all boys and girls prefer to produce trochaic sentences. In lapse sentences, they apply several repair strategies (e.g., deletion or insertion of weak syllables) to create a trochaic pattern. Even though German articles are specified for gender, number and case, they are omitted in exactly the same environments and to the same extent as in English child speech. Prefixes carrying grammatical information tend to be omitted less often compared to noun-initial weak syllables. Bilingual children have greater difficulties realizing lapse sentences compared to monolingual children. We will discuss the implications of our results for the emerging representation of morphosyntactic information in the mental lexicon of German and German-Italian children.