IS THERE A TROCHAIC BIAS IN EARLY WORD LEARNING - EVIDENCE FROM INFANT PRODUCTION IN ENGLISH AND FRENCH

Studies of speech perception and segmentation in the prelinguistic per iod, early word production, and patterns of function word omission in early syntax have all recently emphasized the role of the trochaic acc entual pattern in English, sometimes positing a universal trochaic bia s. We make use of perceptual and acoustic analyses of words and babble from 9 children acquiring English and 5 acquiring French in the late single-word period (13-20 months) to provide a direct test for the exi stence of such a bias. Neither English nor French infant vocalizations were exclusively trochaic. The iambic productions of American infants were traced to the presence of iambic phrases in the input. Differenc es between English and French in the acoustic realization of accent in infant vocalizations were also traceable to adult patterns. However, the almost bipolar distribution of trochaic and iambic patterns in the data from English-learning infants was ultimately traceable to the in tegration of prosodic and segmental patterning in individual child wor d production templates, themselves arguably the product of an earlier acting articulatory filter.