The acquisition of Japanese compound accent rule

This paper reports the results of research on the process of acquisition of Japanese compound accent rules by children aged 4-5. The results reveal: 1) Children acquire genera1 rules before they acquire lexical idiosyncratic rules. 2) Children failed to retain the accent of the second element, and instead place an incorrect accent on the penultimate foot. This result suggests that children acquire placing accent on the penultimate foot prior to retaining the lexical accent of the second element. We discussed a similarity between above result and a constraint-reranking phenomenon in adults’ phonology. 3) The syllable, which plays a important role in adults’ CA rules, does not contribute to the CA rules in children’s phonology. We assumed that children have not acquired sufficient understanding of the syllable to contribute to the CA rules.