Konijn: New methods for analyzing stress pattern acquisition in children
Nienke Wessel
Radboud University
In order to gain more insight into stress pattern acquisition by children, we are in need of large datasets and analysis tools that can analyze those data sets. This paper suggests a new way to analyze PhonBank corpora by automatically loading in the annotated data and plotting it in different manners, focusing on stress pattern acquisition. This way, we can more easily track changes in children's development through time.
This method is applied to three longitudinal and two cross-sectional corpora of Dutch, German, and English. The results show that there are some aspects of previously proposed theories that are in need of further investigation. Most notably, past theories have assumed that stages of stress pattern development were the same across different words, while we found some evidence for stages of development per word. This suggests that further research is needed into how exactly these stages differ for different words, and what determines whether a child learns the correct stress pattern for a word sooner or later.
Furthermore, comparing our findings to those of previous investigations which used manual analysis methods provides us with the opportunity to discuss the drawbacks and benefits of our analysis tool.