Interrelations between phonological and morphological development in the first language acquisition of Spanish phonology: a longitudinal case study

Abstract

This longitudinal case study analyzes the interaction between phonology and morphology in the development of medial, final lexical and final inflectional codas of Irene, a Spanish-learning child from Asturias, Spain. I observe the child’s order of segmental development in light of Polo’s (2013) line of investigation, which shows that nasals are favoured over any other phonological category, as well as the fact that phonological development occurs first, while morphology lags behind. On the other hand, this thesis sheds new light regarding the role of stress in the three coda positions (medial, final lexical and final inflectional), suggesting that this prosodic factor does not have an effect on medial codas; however, its role on final codas cannot be independently verified due to the lack of relevant contexts in the dataset. These observations highlight a possible correlation between stress and word finality, which may be potentially applicable for additional languages.