A Prominence Account of Syllable Reduction in Early Speech Development

Abstract

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.