Interaction of vowel length, utterance-position and focus accent in 3-year olds' Australian English

Durational contrasts can be used to signal prosodic boundaries (utterance-final lengthening) and discourse focus (accentual lengthening). Durational differences can also signal phonemic vowel length contrast such as in non-rhotic Australian English where vowel length distinguishes lexical items (such as, cart /kɐ:t/ and cut /kɐt/). This raises the question of how and when children acquire phonemic vowel length contrasts along with various prosodic length requirements. An elicited imitation task was conducted with nine 3-year-old Australian English-speaking children. Our findings show that the children distinguished long and short vowels in spite of utterance-final and accentual lengthening. The scope of the two types of prosodic lengthening differed, suggesting they are in the process of learning about these prosodic contexts.