Early perceptual strategies for the replication of consonants from polysyllabic lexical models

Perceptual processing strategies for the selection and organization of consonants for early replicas of polysyllabic models were investigated as a related study to the classification of productive strategies (Klein, 1981). The present study investigated the ways in which selected word factors (stress level and serial position of the syllable) provided facilitating cues for the production of polysyllabic words. The original procedure involved collecting a language sample from four children (ages 20-24 months) as each informally interacted with an adult during a play activity that included the manipulation of palpable and picturable objects represented by polysyllabic words. This paper focuses specifically on the perceptual strategies of only two of the four children; each demonstrated equally consistent but dissimilar production patterns. Each child's perceptual strategy is described on the basis of the proportion of instances that his/her consonant replicas could be related with the occurrence of specific word factors. Results revealed that (a) primary stress was an important processing cue for the selection of consonant(s) from 2-syllable words or from longer words containing one major stress, and (b) when two major stress levels occurred in a word, preferences for specific interactions of stress and serial position, as processing cues, appeared to be closely related to the number of syllables a child typically produced. The children, whose productions of the same word were dissimilar, exhibited similar perceptual strategies.