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Do children's omissions leave traces?

Allyson Carter1, LouAnn Gerken

  • 1Department of Linguistics, University of Arizona, Tucson 85721, USA. allcarte@yahoo.com

Journal of Child Language
|December 23, 2004
PubMed
Summary
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Young children often drop unstressed syllables when speaking polysyllabic words. However, acoustic analysis reveals these syllables are not entirely deleted but leave a prosodic trace.

Area of Science:

  • Linguistics
  • Developmental Psychology
  • Phonetics

Background:

  • Two-year-old children frequently omit unstressed initial syllables in polysyllabic words.
  • This omission is often attributed to phonological deletion due to prosodic constraints.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the acoustic properties of omitted syllables in children's speech.
  • To test the assumption that weak syllables are completely deleted from children's utterances.

Main Methods:

  • Two experiments involving 33 two-year-old children imitating sentences.
  • Acoustic analysis of utterance durations, specifically the interval from verb onset to name onset.
  • Comparison of imitated sentences with and without weak initial syllable omissions.

Related Experiment Videos

Main Results:

  • The duration from verb onset to name onset was significantly longer in sentences with omitted syllables compared to those without.
  • This suggests that the omitted syllables are not entirely absent from the acoustic signal.

Conclusions:

  • Children do not completely delete weak initial syllables.
  • Phonetic evidence indicates the presence of a prosodic trace of the omitted syllable.