Effects of prosodic stress and serial position on syllable omission in first words.

Abstract

The authors documented syllable omission in one child's multisyllabic vocabulary from 10 to 20 months of age to evaluate L. Gerken's (1991, 1994a, 1994b) proposal that children organize their productions according to a trochaic metrical (strong-weak) template and omit syllables from target utterances that do not conform to this pattern. The trochaic template hypothesis was not supported by these early productions. Results indicated that the likelihood of producing a target syllable was influenced primarily by the strength of the prosodic stress placed on it and secondarily by its serial order within a word. Over time, the child demonstrated an increasing ability to include syllables with weaker prosodic stress in multisyllabic productions. Omissions became much less common with the onset of 2-word speech.

Rimes and superrimes: An exploration of children's disyllabic rhyming skills

“…Developmental data indicate that this may have the effect of clarifying syllable boundaries in English disyllables with final stress (Duncan, Colé, Seymour, & Magnan, 2006). Thus, the ideas that final stressed syllables have a strengthened representation in the linguistic system (Lewis, Antone, & Johnson, 1999) and that they may be a basis for lexical access (Grosjean & Gee, 1987) are compatible with our observation of an increase in syllable‐based rhyming responses. As onset‐rime structure is thought to be more accessible when a syllable receives emphasis (Gipstein et al , 2000; Sebastiàn‐Gallés, Dupoux, Seguí, & Mehler, 1992), this may explain the parallel increase in rhyming responses based on the rime within the final stressed syllable.…”

Is epenthesis a means to optimize feet? A reanalysis of the CLPF database

“…Our results show that methodological differences may have caused the discrepancy : our analysis of the unambiguous cases confirms Kehoe's and Wijnen's results. Furthermore, our analysis is in keeping with other studies that question the idea that English and Dutch children's word productions are shaped by a rhythmic preference for bisyllabic trochees (Kehoe, 1995 ;Lewis et al, 1999 ;Taelman & Gillis, 2003). Together, these studies support the view that rhythmic changes in words are merely accidental by-products of phonological processes applied for different reasons and that the core domain of rhythmic preferences is the grammatical morpheme.…”

“…Kehoe (1995), Lewis, Antone & Johnson (1999), and Taelman & Gillis (2003) reported patterns of syllable truncation that could not be accounted for by a trochaic rhythmic preference. Kehoe (1995), Lewis, Antone & Johnson (1999), and Taelman & Gillis (2003) reported patterns of syllable truncation that could not be accounted for by a trochaic rhythmic preference.…”

“…There are some doubts about whether these phonological operations in Dutch and English child language always emerge from a rhythmic preference for trochees. Kehoe (1995), Lewis, Antone & Johnson (1999), and Taelman & Gillis (2003) reported patterns of syllable truncation that could not be accounted for by a trochaic rhythmic preference. Moreover, Kehoe (1995) did not find more stress reversals from iambs into trochees (the expected pattern) than the reverse pattern.…”

Prelinguistic evolution in early hominins: Whence motherese?

“…To summarize, the above studies show that motherese varies between cultures in subtle ways that are tailored to the specific difficulties inherent in learning particular languages. Additional studies on speech development in infants document the effects of prosody on syllable omission (Lewis et al 1999) and reduction (Snow 1998); the shaping of monosyllabic utterances (Snow 2002) and words (Demuth 1996;Fee 1997); auditory memory of speech (Mandel et al 1994); and prediction of dialogue structure (Hastie et al 2002). As a general rule, infants' perception of prosodic cues in association with linguistic categories is important for their acquisition of knowledge about phonology, the boundaries between words or phrases in their native languages, and, eventually, syntax.…”