Truncation to Subminimal Words in Early French

It has long been noted that children omit certain unstressed syllables from their early speech, with words like banana surfacing as [ næn ], and words like elephant being realized as [ fa] (e.g., Allen and Hawkins 1978, 1980; Echols and Newport 1992; Echols 1993; Gerken 1994; Pater 1997; Kehoe 2000; see Kehoe and StoelGammon 1997 for a recent review). This led Allen and Hawkins (1978, 1980) to propose a universal bias for children’s early words to contain a strong-weak (Sw) trochaic foot. This proposal has received renewed attention with recent research showing that children learning a number of unrelated languages exhibit a minimal word stage of development, where early words are both minimally and maximally one binary foot (e.g., Dutch — Fikkert 1994; Wijnen, Kirkhaar, and den Os 1994; Spanish — Demuth 2001a; Japanese — Ota 1999; Sesotho — Demuth 1994; Hebrew — Adam 2002). These findings are consistent with the notion that “unmarked” structures such as core (CV) syllables and minimal words (binary feet) are the first to emerge in children’s early grammars (e.g., Fikkert 1994; Demuth 1995; Demuth and Fee 1995; Fee 1996; Pater 1997; Gnanadesikan in press). It also corresponds with cross-linguistic findings showing that open class lexical items and morphologically derived words (e.g., nicknames, clipped forms) tend to take the form of a binary foot (e.g., Itô 1990; McCarthy and Prince