ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the acquisition of L1 Spanish segments (vowels and consonants) and the acquisition of L1 Spanish prosody (namely syllables, metrical feet, prosodic words and phonological phrases). It then turns its attention toward the acquisition of intonation by three monolingual German children; three monolingual Spanish children, aged 1;4 to 1;11; and three German-Spanish bilinguals aged around 3;0 (from 2;11 to 3;1). Child utterances produced at two time points were analyzed within the Autosegmental-Metrical model of intonation. The bilingual children, heritage speakers of Spanish, with German as their dominant language, acquired the intonation of each language in a way that can be considered autonomous, but at the same time there was influence of one language on the other, with transfer of a German pitch accent onto Spanish.
