The role of prosody in the acquisition of grammatical morphemes: evidence from two Chinese languages

This paper examines two issues concerning the acquisition of grammatical morphemes: (1) How is the acquisition of grammatical morphemes influenced by prosodic and phonological characteristics of the language being learned? and (2) What sorts of prosodic and phonological properties do grammatical morphemes have that might aid children in applying particular segmentation strategies? To address these issues, we compared the acquisition of grammatical morphemes in a pair of morphosyntactically similar but prosodically different languages, namely Taiwan Mandarin Chinese (TMC) and Taiwanese (TW). We analyse the patterns of realization and omission of a highly frequent subset of grammatical morphemes in six children's speech, recorded between the ages 1:6 and 2:3. The results from the between-language comparisons suggest that rhythmic characteristics of languages can affect segmentation by providing different kinds of prosodic handles for children to grasp at.