Lexical stress contrastivity in typically developing Italian children

There has been substantial progress in understanding the production of individual speech sounds. Much less is known about prosodic aspects of speech production. Lexical stress is the prosodic contrast between strong and weak syllables within single words (compare ‘INcense’ with ‘inCENSE’ in English). The ability to achieve stress contrastivity during speech production shows a protracted developmental trajectory in healthy children and can be atypical in some individuals within certain populations (e.g., autism spectrum disorders). Almost all previous research in this area has examined speakers of English. One important gap in our understanding is whether lexical stress production seen in typically developing children is similar across languages. Here we provide new data regarding lexical stress production in typically developing Italian children (3-5 years), and a comparison with published data from English speaking children.