The Relationship Between Word Prosodic Structure and Sentence Prosody : (Non)evidence from Brazilian Portuguese

Abstract

"In recent years a number of studies have addressed the acquisition of prosodic structure, in particular word stress (Fikkert 1994, Demuth 1996, Demuth and Fee 1995, Gerken 1994, Archibald 1995, Santos 2001, 2003, Grimm 2004, among others). The study of the acquisition of word stress has been subject to large debates. A number of researchers reported an early trochaic bias in the acquisition of particularly Germanic languages, both in perception (Jusczyk, Cutler and Redanz 1993) and in production (Allen and Hawkins 1978, 1980, Echols and Newport 1992, Gerken 1994, Fikkert 1994, among other). More recently many researchers have convincingly argued that this bias is not innate, but reflects language-specific knowledge (Vihman, DePaolis and Davis 1998, Santos 2001, 2003, 2006 among others). In our earlier work, we have compared word prosodic structure in the acquisition of Dutch and Brazilian Portuguese, where Dutch children have trochaic word patterns at a very early stage, while Brazilian Portuguese children seem to favor iambic word patterns (Fikkert andSantos 2005, Santos 2006)"