‘The (Non)Realization in Children's Utterances: Evidence for a Rhythmic Constraint’

In this study it is argued that the omission of closed class morphemes and of unstressed syllables within words is related to their common characteristic, viz. that they are unstressed, rhythmically weak parts of utterances. Several strands of evidence indicate that it is unlikely that children are unable to perceive these elements in the input speech. The pattern of (non)realization of unstressed syllables within content words and the class of determiners, was analysed in two Dutch children from 1;6 to 2;11. It appeared that polysyllabic words were quite generally truncated in such a way that they fitted a trochaic (strong-weak) pattern, particularly in the early samples. Some observations with respect to the (non)realization of determiners are suggestive of an influence of an SW-constraint on the realization of noun phrases. These findings support the hypothesis that in the course of utterance preparation, words and phrases are mapped onto S(W) templates. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the dissolution of the SW-constraint coincides with the acquisition of specific aspects of stress assignment in Dutch, such as quantity sensitivity. * We thank our subjects and their parents for their patient co-operation. Thanks are also due to Tirtsa Huiskamp, for her assistance in judging stress patterns, and to Loekie Elbers, René Kager, Sarah Hawkins, and an anonymous reviewer, for their thoughtful and stimulating comments on earlier versions of this paper. Els den Os and Frank Wijnen were supported by grants from the PSYCHON foundation, which is funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). Address for correspondence: Frank Wijnen, Department of Linguistics & Department of Psychology, University of Groningen, Oude Kijk in 't Jatstraat 26, 9712 EK, Groningen, The Netherlands. E-mail: [email protected]. FrankWijnen, Evelien Krikhaar & Els denOs, ‘The (Non)Realization in Children's Utterances: Evidence for a Rhythmic Constraint’