Lexical stress development in preschool children

An acoustic phonetic study

Abstract

Few studies have addressed the ability of young children to produce stressed and unstressed syllables. Most of them focused on English speaking children and have adopted an acoustic analysis limited to the parameters of duration, intensity and F0. Even less investigated is the development of lexical stress in Italian children, and of the few studies found in the literature, none has looked at parameters such as formant values or spectral emphasis. Our aim is to investigate how two years old Italian children produce and develop lexical stress, observing their productions longitudinally over a six months period. We will also compare children and adults’ productions.