An Acoustic Study of Word-medial Stop Consonants in 2-3 Year-Old Speakers of American English

Child productions of two-syllable strong-weak words like baby and cookie are observed to exhibit a wide range of implementations of the medial stop consonant compared to adult productions. Detailed acoustic analysis of these consonants reported here lays the groundwork for prosodic analysis of the role of foot structure in the development of production of bisyllabic words. Acoustic details of the child productions differ significantly from those of the adults. The direction of these differences (e.g., longer durations, less pre-voicing) mean the child productions are more similar to an onset stop consonant of a two-syllable strong-weak word. However, children sometimes also reduce stop consonants in this environment to a greater extent than would an adult.