ABSTRACT The dissertation examines the acquisition of the tone and accent systems of KiVunjo Chagga, a Bantu language spoken in the Kilimanjaro region of Tanzania. Although it is widely believed that infants acquire prosodic systems very early, there is evidence from English and Asian tone languages that distinctive pitch is not acquired prior to segmental phonology. There has been no comprehensive study of the acquisition of tone in a Bantu-type tone language. This research pays particular attention to the development of distinctive tone, its relationship to the metrical accent system of KiVunjo, and the development of tone rules. Field research consists of a longitudinal naturalistic study of four children, two from age 2 and two from age 3, thereby covering the age range 2-4. The children will be audio recorded in their homes once a month for at least one year. Recording sessions will last an entire day, and will cover a wide range of the child's normal activities and interlocutors. Tapes will be transcribed immediately with the help of a native-speaker assistant, and transcripts will be entered into a computer. The resulting corpus will be available to other researchers.
