Effects of prosodic stress and serial position on syllable omission in first words

The authors documented syllable omission in one child's multisyllabic vocab ulary from 10 to 20 months of age to evaluate L. Gerken's (1991, 1994a, 199 4b) proposal that children organize their productions according to a trocha ic metrical (strong-weak) template and omit syllables from target utterance s that do not conform to this pattern. The trochaic template hypothesis was not supported by these early productions. Results indicated that the likel ihood of producing a target syllable was influenced primarily by the streng th of the prosodic stress placed on it and secondarily by its serial order within a word. Over time, the child demonstrated an increasing ability to i nclude syllables with weaker prosodic stress in multisyllabic productions. Omissions became much less common with the onset of 2-word speech.