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Updated: Jul 13, 2026
06:35
Examining Recall Memory in Infancy and Early Childhood Using the Elicited Imitation Paradigm
Published on: April 28, 2016
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
Summary
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.
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.
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