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Prosody
Spanish is a syllable-timed language. Stressed syllables are 50% longer in duration than non-stressed syllables. Although pitch, duration, and loudness contribute to the perception of stress, pitch is the most important in isolation.

Primary stress occurs on the penultima (the next to last syllable) 80% of the time. The other 20% of the time, stress falls on the ultima and antepenultima.

Nonverbs are generally stressed on the penultimate syllable for vowel-final words and on the final syllable of consonant-final words. Exceptions are marked orthographically, whereas regular words are underlyingly phonologically marked with a stress feature [+stress].

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Phonotactics
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 * Coda
 * First consonant (C3): Can be any consonant.
 * Second consonant (C4): Must be . A coda combination of two consonants only appears in loanwords (mainly from Classical Latin), never in words inherited from Vulgar Latin.
 * Medial codas assimilate place features of the following onsets and are often stressed.

Phonology
Phonological development varies greatly by individual, both those developing regularly and those with delays. However, a general pattern of acquisition of phonemes can be inferred by the level of complexity of their features, i.e. by sound classes. A hierarchy may be constructed, and if a child is capable of producing a discrimination on one level, he/she will also be capable of making the discriminations of all prior levels.


 * The first level consists of stops (without a voicing distinction), nasals,, and optionally, a non-lateral approximant. This includes a labial/coronal place difference (for example, vs  and  vs ).


 * The second level includes voicing distinction for oral stops and a coronal/dorsal place difference. This allows for distinction between, , and , along with their voiced counterparts, as well as distinction between and the approximant.


 * The third level includes fricatives and/or affricates.


 * The fourth level introduces liquids other than, and . It also introduces.


 * The fifth level introduces the trill.

This hierarchy is based on production only, and is a representation of a child’s capacity to produce a sound, whether that sound is the correct target in adult speech or not. Thus, it may contain some sounds that are not included in the adult phonology, but produced as a result of error.

Spanish-speaking children will accurately produce most segments at a relatively early age. By around three-and-a-half years, they will no longer productively use phonological processes the majority of the time. Some common error patterns (found 10% or more of the time) are cluster reduction, liquid simplification, and stopping. Less common patterns (evidenced less than 10% of the time) include palatal fronting, assimilation, and final consonant deletion.

Typical phonological analyses of Spanish consider the consonants, , and the underlying phonemes and their corresponding approximants , , and  allophonic and derivable by phonological rules. However, approximants may be a more basic form because monolingual Spanish-learning children learn to produce the continuant contrast between [ ] and [  ] before they do the lead voicing contrast between [p t k] and [b d g]. (In comparison, English-learning children are able to produce adult-like voicing contrasts for these stops well before age three.) The allophonic distribution of [  ] and [  ] produced in adult speech is not learned until after age two and not fully mastered even at age four.

The alveolar trill is one of the most difficult sounds to be produced in Spanish and as a result is acquired later in development. Research suggests that the alveolar trill is acquired and developed between the ages of three and six years. Some children acquire an adult-like trill within this period and some fail to properly acquire the trill. The attempted trill sound of the poor trillers is often perceived as a series of taps due to hyperactive tongue movement during production.

Codas
One research study found that children acquire medial codas before final codas, and stressed codas before unstressed codas. Since medial codas are often stressed and must undergo place assimilation, greater importance is accorded to their acquisition. Liquid and nasal codas occur word medially and at the ends of frequently-used function words, so they are often acquired first.

Prosody
Research suggests that children overgeneralize stress rules when they are reproducing novel Spanish words and that they have a tendency to stress the penultimate syllables of antepenultimately stressed words, to avoid a violation of nonverb stress rules that they have acquired. Interestingly, many of the most frequent words heard by children have irregular stress patterns or are verbs, which violate nonverb stress rules. This complicates stress rules until ages three to four, when stress acquisition is essentially complete, and children begin to apply these rules to novel irregular situations.