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Because strong-weak alternations are presumably preferred by young children, we looked for evidence of stress shift in kinematic and transcription-based analyses of children’s speech. Children with typical language development (TLD, N = 16) and specific language impairment (SLI, N = 16) between five and eight years of age named pictures corresponding to nonsense adjective + real noun phrases. Half of the phrases had clashing stress patterns at their boundary (e.g., p?p?p baby) and half did not (e.g., pa?mib banana). Accurate productions of a portion of each phrase were selected and analyzed kinematically for total duration, inter-word pause, movement amplitude and duration (correlates of stress), and overall variability. Children with SLI showed more variable movements and longer pauses than their TLD peers. However, all children were only weakly sensitive to stress clash. There were segmental influences, revealing that other phonological variables may play a more prominent role in production processes than a preference for alternating strong and weak syllables.
Funding Source: NIH T32 DC000030-17 |
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