The Prosodic (Re)organization of Determiners

Researchers have long known that children variably produce grammatical morphemes in spontaneous speech (e.g., Brown, 1973). Thus, a given child on a given day may supply a determiner (such as the article a or the) or a tense morpheme (such as the past tense marker –t/d) in some utterances but not in others. This has typically led researchers to propose that children’s syntactic representations are immature or syntactically underspecified (e.g., Wexler, 1994; Rice, Wexler, & Cleave, 1995). However, in a series of elicited production experiments, Gerken (1996) showed that English-speaking 2-year-olds were more likely to produce determiners (in this case definite articles) when these could be prosodified as part of a Strong-weak metrical foot. Thus, children were more likely to produce a determiner in sentences like (1a) (where the can be prosodified as part of a Strong-weak metrical foot with the preceding monosyllabic verb) than in sentences like (1b) (where the remains unfooted following a disyllabic verb, which is already a foot).