A PRODUCTION LIMITATION IN SYLLABLE NUMBER - A LONGITUDINAL-STUDY OF ONE CHILDS EARLY VOCABULARY

The present paper reports on the phonological form of one child's prod uctive vocabulary from age 0;10 to 1;8 with primary focus on his produ ction of multisyllabic targets. A large percentage of his multisyllabi c vocabulary was produced as one syllable until the age of 1;6. This l imitation was not due to a tendency to extract only single syllables f rom the speech stream, but rather due primarily to a limitation on pro duction. While some portion of his one-syllable productions could be i nterpreted as the result of single syllable extraction, a sizeable por tion affirmed that he extracted the target size correctly by his inclu sion of first and final target phonemes in his productions (e.g. [po] for piano and [kiz] for candies). The resolution of this limitation co incides with his move toward two-word speech. We conclude that there i s a developmental and perhaps maturational limitation in the capacity to carry out the processes underlying word and sentence production.