“A Metrical Template Account of Children’s Weak Syllable Omissions From Multisyllabic Words” by Louann Gerken, Book Review Example

“A metrical template account of children’s weak syllable omissions from multisyllabic words” by Louann Gerken discusses the phenomenon of children’s often leaving out weakly stressed syllables from multisyllabic words, omitting weak syllables from initial positions more likely than from internal or final word positions. As foundation for her research, the author refers to three hypotheses offered as an explanation for this “omission pattern”. The two of them proposes that the phenomenon reflects “innate perceptual biases either to ignore initial weak syllables or to encode word-final syllables”. Yet the third one, the SW Production Template Hypothesis, in contrast proposes that the reason for syllable omission is a certain template that children use, which implies production of strong syllable followed by an optional weak syllable.

To research and compare the theories the author uses in her investigations The Perceive Last Syllable Hypothesis which proposes that all children have an inborn bias to distinguish or pick out stressed and word-final syllables developed by Slobin, 1973; Echols & Newport, 1992; Echols, 1993 and to the Ignore First Syllable Hypothesis derived from suggestions by Cutler (1990; Cutler & Norris, 1988) for adult lexical access, and by Gleitman & Wanner (1982; Gleitman, Gleitman, Landau & Wanner, 1988) for language acquisition.

The importance of the provided research lies in, as the author mentions, in the implication for “children’s function morpheme omissions and for the relation of metrical and segmental production templates”. It’s significant not only for demonstrating proofs of performance constraints in children’s utterances, but more for showing how linguistic regularities encoded by the children are revealed in production. Moreover, it helps to reflect the development of the linguistic representations.

To urge the advantage of the SW Production Template Hypothesis over the other two,
Louann Gerken presents two experiments conducted.  To contrast the three mentioned above hypotheses, young two-year old were asked to imitate novel four-syllable words with SWWS and WSWS stress patterns. 26 developing middle-class children from the NY area were found through the newspaper advertisements, posters, and by word-of-mouth to participate in the experiment. The children were visited by researchers in their homes. The second experiment was designed for testing children’s preservations segmental interpretation. The materials were the same as those used in first experiment with only small disparities, while the procedures were perfectly identical. Both Experiments 1 and 2 supported the SW Production Template Hypothesis over the other two.

The author states that the research demonstrates the possibility of “creating models of young children’s speech production processes and testing these models on experimental and naturalistic data”. The present research corresponds with a diversity of other observations revealing the significance of children’s speech planning and production systems as main factors influencing the form of their utterances.

“Prosodic Patterns in Children’s Multisyllabic Word Productions” by Margaret M. Kehoe reviews and discusses the results of “the influence of metrical and segmental effects on English-speaking children’s multisyllabic word productions” research. The author refers to the number of studies examining the phenomenon that has been conducted before. The author presents and assesses three approaches that are proposed in the literature by other authors on the account of the mentioned subject: (1) prosodic structure, (2) trochaic template, (3) perceptual salience.

The conducted examination of children’s truncation or syllable deletion patterns resulted in a number of important and strongly supported findings. The revealed results are that, firstly, non-final unstressed syllables are kept in less frequently than stressed and word-final unstressed syllables; secondly, word-internal syllables with sonorant onsets are preserved less often than word-internal unstressed syllables with obstruent onsets; next, unstressed syllables with reduced vowels are preserved less frequently than unstressed syllables with non-reduced vowels; and finally, left-sided stressed syllables are kept in less often than right-sided stressed syllables. The author also mentions the fact that examination of children’s stress patterns demonstrated that “children made greater numbers of stress errors in target words with irregular stress”.

Moreover, the author includes in the article the observation of how mentioned findings are implicated clinically, and the description of additional studies that have applied a metrical approach to clinical subjects. All the studies observed underline how important it is to have an accurate linguistic model of prosodic acquisition to base clinical intervention on.

The author refers to other scientists who have also been examining the subject and who provide the support and guidelines for her research (Velleman, Shriberg, Kwiatkowski, Rasmussen, Carter, Pigott, Kessler-Robb, Kent, Rosenbeck, Snow, Hochberg, etc.).

“Early Perceptual Strategies for the Replication of Consonants from Polysyllabic Lexical Models” by Harriet B. Klein investigated and discusses the ways in which particular word factors such as stress level and serial position of the syllable facilitate the production of polysyllabic words. The article also presents investigation of “perceptual processing strategies or the selection and organization of consonants for early replicas of polysyllabic mode” as a study related to the classification of productive strategies. Originally the study was conducted through collecting a language sample from four children, yet in present article the author focuses on only two of them. “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”.

The results of the study presented by the author demonstrate that primary stress plays an important role in the choice of consonant from two- or more syllable words, and that there is a close connection between number of syllables that a child usually produces and preferences for specific interactions of processing cues (stress and serial position) when two main stress level appear.

The author states that the main purposes of the investigation is to describe how syllabic factors provide cues for selection and arrangement of consonant production in early stages of lexical/phonological development, as well as to observe the connection between the way children modify their words and the way their modifications are influenced by particular input factors. Klein also recommends considering supra-segmental influence when determining “strength hierarchies between and among consonants during phonological acquisition and for planning intervention goals for children who are somehow impaired in developing production skills”.

The analysis provided by the author is based on more detailed observation of Klein (1981) and is related to the conceptual framework provided in the works of Smith (1973), Ingram (1974b), and Shriberg and Kwiatkowski (1980). The study is also based on part of a doctoral dissertation completed by the author at Teachers College, Columbia University, 1977.