title: Cluster reduction and compensatory lengthening in the acquisition of possessive -s.
abstract: Previous research shows that two-year-olds' third person singular -s and plural -s are produced more accurately in utterance-final compared to utterance-medial position. However, only the third person singular is affected by coda complexity. This study explores these effects with possessive -s. Acoustic analysis of twelve two-year-olds' elicited imitations examined the use of simple versus complex codas (e.g. Sue's vs. Doug's ) both utterance-medially and utterance-finally. Morpheme production was surprisingly robust across contexts, though coda clusters were often simplified to a lengthened -s morpheme utterance-medially (e.g., Dou's [dɐz]). The findings raise many questions about the development of speech planning processes across populations.
authors.affiliation: Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University.
authors.forename: Kiri Trengove
authors.initials: KT
authors.lastname: Mealings
authors.affiliation: Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University.
authors.forename: Katherine
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Demuth
mesh_terms: D002675:Child, Preschool; D016000:Cluster Analysis; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D012660:Semantics; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D014706:Verbal Learning