Children's Articulation of Medial Consonant Clusters: Implications for Syllabification

Abstract

Among solutions to syllabification of medial clusters are those which yield syllable assignment for medial consonants that conform to constraints on word initial and final segments. In this study, selected speaker/listener performances on medial clusters were compared with response trends for word initial/final consonants. Thirty preschool children (ten at each of three articulation proficiency levels on /s/ based on deep test scores) imitated 40 nonsense bisyllables of equal stress. The stimuli included intervocalic unclustered /s/, as well as consonant clusters that conformed to word initial /s/ clusters and those that did not. Syllable assignment was imposed on the medial consonants using boundary insertion rules proposed by Hooper (1972, 1973). Performance differences between medial clusters with assigned tautosyllabic and heterosyllabic features in both the frequency and pattern of articulation errors appeared to reflect constraints on word initial/final segments. The results suggest that medial contiguous consonants that conform to word initial clusters and those that do not should be differentially treated in syllable boundary assignment.