Syllable Omissions Research Articles

Syllable Omissions and Additions in Dutch Child Language: An Inquiry Into the Function of Rhythm and the Link With Innate Grammar

Syllable Omissions and Additions in Dutch Child Language: An Inquiry Into the Function of Rhythm and the Link With Innate Grammar

Influence of phonology on morpho‐syntax in Romance languages in children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI)

The profiles of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) differ greatly according to the language they speak. The Surface Hypothesis attempts to explain these differences through the theory that children with SLI will incorrectly produce elements in their language with low phonological weights or that are produced in a non-canonical prosodic structure. Previous studies have shown that the most characteristics errors produced by Catalan and Spanish-speaking children with SLI include function word omission (morpho-syntax) and weak syllable omission (phonology). The omission of function words points to a morpho-syntactic explanation of SLI, while weak syllable omission supports a phonological explanation of SLI. Yet, function words are weak syllables; thus, it is possible that the same mechanism underlies both problems. Data were extracted from spontaneous language produced by five children with SLI and five comparison children matched for age and MLU-w. They were assessed on two occasions: at 3;10 and 4;9 years of age. These interviews were then transcribed and the morphological and phonological errors coded. A non-parametric mean analysis and various regression analyses were conducted. The results show that function word omission and weak syllable omission were the most characteristic errors made by Spanish and Catalan-speaking children with SLI and established that omissions increase as prosodic weight decreases. They also indicated that weak syllabic omission may explain most function word omissions. The data support the Surface Hypothesis and suggest that the same impaired mechanism may underlie the morphological and phonological problems SLI children display.

The error patterns of different nonword repetition tasks in 3-year-old Mandarin-speaking children

This study investigates qualitatively and quantitatively 3-year-old Mandarin-speaking children’s error patterns in two nonword repetition tasks which differ in their degrees of wordlikeness, i.e., the nonce word and the gap word sets. Their performances in the two tasks were transcribed and analyzed from two respects: (1) the rate of a specific unit retaining the target structure and (2) the cross comparison between linguistic units and error processes. Results showed that tones and syllable structures of the target forms were easier to retain than the contents. And even though children’s error patterns approximated the adults patterns in gap word repetition task, they had strategic difference in dealing the weight decay in memory: while the children used syllable and rhyme substitutions, the adults used syllable omissions. Our study has implied that children have the same processing mechanism with adults in learning novel words. However, their strategic difference may have an implication for language learning. In addition, the present study also contributes the processing of tone to the linguistically constrained model (Hartley & Houghton, ‘‘A linguistically constrained model of short-term memory for nonwords,’’ J. Mem. Lang. 35, 1–31 1996), so that it can become a more complete model in demonstrating how novel sound sequences are learned and recalled in Mandarin-speaking young children.

Do children's omissions leave traces?

When English-speaking two-year-olds begin producing polysyllabic words, they often omit unstressed syllables that precede syllables with primary stress (Allen & Hawkins, 1980; Klein, 1981; Gerken, 1994a). One proposed mechanism for these omissions is that children omit syllables at a phonological level, due to prosodic constraints that act on outputs. Under such accounts, it has been largely assumed that these syllables are simply missing, or deleted, from children's outputs. The present research consists of a pair of experiments that tested this assumption by investigating the acoustic properties of utterances manifesting or lacking weak initial syllable omissions. In the two experiments, 33 two-year-old children were asked to imitate sentences like 'He kissed Lucinda' (often reduced as expected to a disyllabic trochaic form, e.g. 'He kissed _cinda') and 'He kissed Cindy'. Durations of each child's imitations were measured from the onset of the verb to the onset of the name, for each pair of sentences containing the reduced or unreduced disyllabic forms, for example, 'kissed cinda' vs. 'kissed Cindy'. Our results yielded a significantly longer duration for the verb-onset to name-onset portion of sentences containing reduced '_cinda'-type names than for sentences with 'Cindy'-type names. This finding provides evidence that children do not completely delete weak syllables. Rather, the data from the phonetic analysis indicate that some prosodic trace exists of the omitted syllable.

Similarities in weak syllable omissions between children with specific language impairment and normally developing language: a preliminary report

Two-year-olds with normally developing language (NL) and older children with specific language impairment (SLI) omit initial weak syllables from words (e.g., “ banana”∼“ nana” ). Previous research revealed a phonetic “trace” of syllables omitted by children with NL ( Carter, 1999; Carter & Gerken, submitted for publication). The present study asked whether similar evidence could be found for omissions by children with SLI. Fourteen children with SLI produced sentences containing reduced or unreduced disyllabic proper names (e.g., “Feed_cinda,” from “Feed Lucinda” vs. “Feed Cindy”). Acoustic analyses revealed a significantly longer duration for verb-onset to name-onset of sentences containing the reduced name, indicating that although segmental material is omitted, an acoustic trace remains. In addition, a phonological examination showed similarities between groups regarding sentential and syllabic factors that affect omission rates, as well as an interesting difference that suggests different strategies the groups use in acquiring adult targets. Learning outcomes As a result of reading this article, participants should (1) have a better understanding of similarities and differences in the language production of children with specific language impairment and normally developing language, with regard to prosodic development, (2) be familiar with several models of the phenomenon of weak syllable omissions in children’s developing language, and (3) recognize the importance of using a combination of linguistic analysis types when studying issues in child language production.

Prosodic effects on word reduction.

It is widely known that English-speaking children reduce words by omitting syllables in certain predictable patterns (e.g., banána --> nána). One way to better understand the nature of phonological reductions in children is to examine adults' word reduction behavior. This study explored whether adults produce predictable output patterns when reducing words. Undergraduate participants heard a list of polysyllabic words varying systematically across syllable number and primary stress location and were asked to generate a "reduced" form, similar to common English reductions (e.g., rhinóceros --> rhino). Regardless of stress and syllable number, participants reduced the stimulus words significantly more often to left-headed disyllabic or monosyllabic feet, retaining stressed syllables and omitting unstressed syllables. The general bias found was similar to that which children exhibit in natural speech, namely, to maintain well-formed prosodic patterns and preserve salient syllables. On the other hand, a tendency to preserve word-initial instead of word-final syllables was also found, suggesting subtle differences in language processing between children and adults. The current study contributes to the psycholinguistic literature on adults' syllable omissions in abbreviations and fast-speech registers by examining the processing strategies that adults may use when reducing words.

Syllable Omission by Two-Year-Old Children

An eye-gaze and production probe examined the ability of 2-year-old children to perceive and produce minimal pairs of novel trisyllabic words with primary stress on the first or second syllables. The syllables contained dissimilar or similar vowel contrasts to determine if segments affected omission. The results supported a prosodic model, with the children's bias toward a strong-weak-weak prosodic structure and omission more frequent for the first syllable of the weak-strong-weak word pairs. Syllable omission was less frequent for strong-weak-weak word pairs that contained dissimilar vowels, suggesting that segments play a role in syllable omission.

Diagnóstico diferencial precoz entre el trastorno del lenguaje y el retraso del lenguaje a partir de los procesos de simplificación fonológica

The main objective of this paper is to identify the characterising phonological errors that allow an early differential diagnosis between SLI and LD. The subjects were 20 children composed by four groups: 5 children with SLI, 5 with LD, 5 age controls and 5 MLU-W controls. The phonological simplification processes (Ingram, 1983; Bosch, 1983; 1987) were identified in these groups and used as key variables to performed a stepwise discriminant analyses. The results showed that the variable that had the greatest power to discriminate the group TL from the groups LD, MLU controls and Age controls was the syllable omission and the variable that distinguished better between the SLI, LD and MLU controls from the age controls group was the omission of codas. However, this discriminant analysis couldn't reclassify the subjects in four groups (70 %) because all the variables had a lower power to discriminate between LD and MLU-W controls. In order to assess the hypothesis that the LD and MLU controls have the same phonological profile, another discriminant analysis were carried out with three groups (SLI [5 children], LD + MLU controls [10 children] and Age controls [5 children]).The results of this analysis showed that the same variables (omission of syllables and codas) could reclassify 90% of the subjects. This result indicates that the children with LD and MLU controls are acquiring the phonology similarly, whereas SLI children may be not. These results are further discussed in relation to the Surface Hypothesis of Leonard (1998)

Effects of prosodic stress and serial position on syllable omission in first words.

Effects of prosodic stress and serial position on syllable omission in first words.

A prominence account of syllable reduction in early speech development: the child's prosodic phonology of tiger and giraffe.

When young children produce multiword utterances and words that are polysyllabic in adult speech, they are most likely to omit unstressed syllables. Because unstressed syllables are omitted more often in weak-strong (iambic) than in strong-weak (trochaic) environments, a trochaic metrical theory has been proposed to account for the asymmetrical omission pattern. This paper presents an alternative explanation based on the notion of relative prosodic prominence. I propose that syllable prominence is a product of two orthogonal suprasegmental systems: one that marks stress/accent peaks and one that marks phrase boundaries. A two-component scale of prominence values reflecting the contributions of both systems was used to analyze single- and multi-word speech samples of 11 children 19 to 26 months of age. The results show that the prominence scale parsimoniously accounts not only for the bias toward syllable omissions in nontrochaic environments but also explains other types of syllable reduction not captured by metrical theories. Implications of the dual-system prosodic model are discussed in terms of possible contributions to a perceptually based theory of early polysyllabic and multiword patterns in child speech.

The role of stress and articulatory difficulty in children's early productions.

Interactions between stress level and articulatory difficulty as influences on children's early words were investigated in an elicited imitation task. Thirty-two 26-month-old children were asked to imitate nonsense-word stimuli containing target syllables that varied in articulatory difficulty and level of stress. Both factors had significant effects on aspects of the children's imitations, although the relative contributions of each differed for whole word avoidance, syllable omissions, and accuracy of production. Implications of these differential effects for accounts of children's early productions are discussed.

Metrical patterns of words and production accuracy.

This investigation examined the influence of metrical patterns of words (syllable stress and serial position) on the production accuracy of 20 children (22 to 28 months). The data were productions of six pairs of individualized two-syllable experimental words that referred to unfamiliar objects. Members of each pair differed only in the placement of stress (e.g., ['soti] vs. [so'ti]). Unstressed syllables were much more likely to be omitted, particularly at the beginning of words. Very few stressed syllables and unstressed second position syllables were omitted. One fourth of the word initial unstressed syllables were omitted. Consonant omissions, though few in number, tended to occur in initial position. Assimilation errors were not influenced by stress or serial position. When segmental errors due to syllable omissions were excluded, other consonant errors were not affected by stress or serial position. These findings indicate that young children's productions of syllables are influenced by the metrical patterns of words. However, the trochaic pattern of English is a statistical tendency, not an absolute constraint on two-syllable words. Metrical pattern also does not affect the consonant accuracy in syllables produced.

A metrical template account of children's weak syllable omissions from multisyllabic words.

Young children learning English as well as many other languages frequently omit weakly stressed syllables from multisyllabic words. In particular, they are more likely to omit weak syllables from word-initial positions than from word-internal or -final positions. For example, the weak syllable of a weak-strong (WS) word like giraffe is much more likely to be omitted than the weak syllable of a SW word like tiger. Three hypotheses for this omission pattern have been offered. In two, children's weak syllable omissions reflect innate perceptual biases either to ignore initial weak syllables or to encode word-final syllables. In contrast, the SW Production Template Hypothesis states that children have a template for producing a strong syllable followed by an optional weak syllable. When they apply a series of SW templates to their intended utterances, weak syllables that do not fit the templates are more likely to be omitted than those that do. To compare the three hypotheses, young two-year-olds were asked to say four-syllable SWWS and WSWS nonsense words. Children's pattern of weak syllable preservations was highly consistent with the SW production template hypothesis, but not with the perception-based hypotheses. Implications of this research for children's function morpheme omissions and for the relation of metrical and segmental production templates are discussed.

Developmental Phonology

Utterances of 60 normally developing children, who were within 6 months of their second birthdays, were analyzed for occurrences of phonological processes. The subjects were divided equally into three chronological age groups: (a) 1:6-1:9, (b) 1:10-2:1, and (c) 2:2-2:5. The most prevalent phonological processes evidenced by all three groups were cluster reduction and deviations involving liquids (e.g., gliding). Phonological process percentage-of-occurrence means were considerably lower for the middle group than for the youngest group, with the most dramatic differences occurring for syllable reduction and postvocalic singleton omission. Potential clinical applications of the data for ascertaining what constitutes disordered phonological development in preschool children are discussed, as well as implications for specifying remediation priorities.

Phonological error patterns in developmental verbal dyspraxia.

Phonological error patterns are analyzed in a group of 10 children presenting symptoms consistent with Developmental Verbal Dyspraxia. Results indicate a dominance of "sequentially constrained" errors primarily involving sound and syllable omissions and timing errors. Rank-order correlations among the phonological errors and between phonological errors and developmental indices suggest that these children have a specific expressive language problem dominated by phonological errors of sequential reduction. Interpretation of the data points to a central motor planning deficit. Comparisons are made with other studies depicting neuropsychological deficits in similar children.