This paper discusses the acquisition of external sandhi rules by one child learning Brazilian Portuguese. We show that these rules appear as soon as the child start putting two words together, but the rules are not uniform in the beginning of the process and are adult-like only around 3;6 years-old. We also show that the child use elision as a default strategy, that the prosodic properties of the rules are acquired before the segmental ones, and that the rules are not used for rhythmic optimization in the beginning of the acquisition process. Finally, our analysis provides support for Scarpa's analysis that prosodic acquisition proceeds from the higher to the lower levels.
external sandhi rules; language acquisition; phonology; prosody
