In the present paper, two models of prosodic development are introduced and examined. As they evidence, the acquisition of word prosody largely conforms to the prosodic hierarchy in such a way that universal prosodic constituents as the foot or the mora govern children’s word productions. This is essential in both models. However, it has turned out in the discussion that there are empirical, theoretical and methodical shortcomings. Common problems of both accounts are the absence of empirical and theoretical motivation of level stress and the reliance on truncations as the primary diagnostics of prosodic development.
In sum, the evidence so far rather supports the prosodic hierarchy model of Demuth & Fee (1995) because it is more flexible than Fikkert’s template mapping model.
