Coarticulatory effects on "the" production in child and adult speech

If prosodic words are the principle units of speech planning and production, then the production of an unstressed grammatical word should be especially influenced by the adjacent context word with which it is chunked. The current study tested this prediction in child and adult speech to investigate the development of the speech plan. Anticipatory and perseveratory influences on determiner vowel production were investigated in simple SVO sentences produced by 5-year-old children and college-aged adults. Although children's productions indicated greater perseveratory influences than adults' productions, anticipatory effects were consistently stronger than perseveratory effects across age groups. The results suggest that, by age 5 years, children chunk determiners along morphosyntactic boundaries just like adults.