ACQUISITION OF WORD STRESS IN GERMAN: VOWEL DURATION AND INCOMPLETENESS OF CLOSURE

This paper presents the results of a study concerning the acoustic correlates of contrastive word stress in bisyllabic and trisyllabic German words, produced by four children aged 2;3 to 7;3 and their mothers. We found that German children of that age are cer- tainly able to produce contrastive word stress and that vowel duration is the most reliable correlate of word stress in the target words, independent of the position of the vowel within the word. Furthermore, we found the voice quality parameter incomplete- ness of closure most uniformly used by the mothers to mark word stress while the children are on differ- ent acquisition stages for this parameter.