A production limitation in syllable number: a longitudinal study of one child's early vocabulary

Abstract

The present paper reports on the phonological form of one child's productive vocabulary from age 0;10 to 1;8 with primary focus on his production of multisyllabic targets. A large percentage of his multisyllabic vocabulary was produced as one syllable until the age of 1;6. This limitation was not due to a tendency to extract only single syllables from the speech stream, but rather due primarily to a limitation on production. While some portion of his one-syllable productions could be interpreted as the result of single syllable extraction, a sizeable portion affirmed that he extracted the target size correctly by his inclusion of first and final target phonemes in his productions (e.g. [po] for piano and [kiz] for candies). The resolution of this limitation coincides with his move toward two-word speech. We conclude that there is a developmental and perhaps maturational limitation in the capacity to carry out the processes underlying word and sentence production.

Do bilingual two-year-olds have separate phonological systems?

“…Crosslinguistic comparisons reveal that preference for final syllable preservation occurs in other languages as well (Vihman, 1996). However, other researchers have noted that truncation patterns also show the effects of prosodic biases or constraints in production, beyond, or in addition to, the effects of perceptual biases (Allen & Hawkins, 1980;Demuth, 1996;Fikkert, 1994;Gennari & Demuth, 1997;Gerken, 1994aGerken, , 1994bGerken, Landau, & Remez, 1990;Johnson, Lewis, & Hogan, 1997;Kehoe & Stoel-Gammon, 1997;Pater, 1997a;Pater & Paradis, 1996;Schwartz & Goffman, 1995;Wijnen et al, 1994). Specifically, it has been claimed that English-speaking and Dutchspeaking children have a "trochaic bias" in their selection of which syllables to omit and which to retain in a truncated production (Allen & Hawkins, 1980;Gerken, 1994aGerken, , 1994bGerken, Landau, & Remez, 1990;Schwartz & Goffman, 1995;Wijnen et al, 1994).…”

Geminate template: A model for first Finnish words

“…Children at nine months of age prefer listening to S-W sequences over W-S sequences (Echols, Crowhurst & Childers, 1997;Jusczyk, Cutler & Redanz, 1993). Although the segments or the features of the unstressed syllables that are retained in production reveal that the elements of unstressed syllables are also registered by the child (Johnson, Lewis & Hogan, 1997), several approaches assume that children pay particular attention to stressed syllables and set up trochaic templates (SW) in their early word production (Fikkert, 1994;Gerken, 1994;Wijnen, Krikhaar & Den Os, 1994). However, the stressed syllables are not the only acoustically salient guide.…”

Word length in syllables: evidence from early word production in Finnish

“…In the early stages of phonological development, word production is often affected by stress patterns. For example, the deletion of weak or unstressed syllables from polysyllabic words is widely documented in several languages (see Demuth 1996, Gerken 1994, Johnson, Lewis & Hogan 1997, Vihman 1980 Krikhaar & Den 0 s 1994). T h e most vulnerable weak syllables are those located in word-initial position (Allen & Hawkins 1980).…”