Temporal Measures of Reduced /sC/-clusters in Toddler Speech: Evidence for a Detailed Lexical Specification

Cluster reduction is a common phenomenon in toddlers‟ productions. The question in this paper is how toddlers store target complex onsets in their mental lexicon: are cluster reductions the result of an incomplete lexical specification? We focus on cluster reductions in /sC/-onsets, like in [liːp] for „sleep‟. By means of a detailed acoustic analysis we compare toddlers‟ productions of target /sC/onsets that have been phonetically transcribed as reduced to a single consonant, to their productions of similar target words with a singleton consonant. The main finding in this study is that in the acoustic signal of reduced productions of target /sC/-onsets there is a temporal trace of the „deleted‟ segment, providing evidence for a covert contrast between words with complexand simple onsets. Toddlers‟ lexical representations of /sC/onsets thus appear to be complete.