title: Examination of the Locus of Positional Effects on Children's Production of Plural -s: Considerations From Local and Global Speech Planning.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Prosodic and articulatory factors influence children's production of inflectional morphemes. For example, plural -s is produced more reliably in utterance-final compared to utterance-medial position (i.e., the positional effect), which has been attributed to the increased planning time in utterance-final position. In previous investigations of plural -s, utterance-medial plurals were followed by a stop consonant (e.g., dogsbark), inducing high articulatory complexity. We examined whether the positional effect would be observed if the utterance-medial context were simplified to a following vowel.
  
  
  METHODS
  An elicited imitation task was used to collect productions of plural nouns from 2-year-old children. Nouns were elicited utterance-medially and utterance-finally, with the medial plural followed by either a stressed or an unstressed vowel. Acoustic analysis was used to identify evidence of morpheme production.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The positional effect was absent when the morpheme was followed by a vowel (e.g., dogseat). However, it returned when the vowel-initial word contained 2 syllables (e.g., dogsarrive), suggesting that the increased processing load in the latter condition negated the facilitative effect of the easy articulatory context.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Children's productions of grammatical morphemes reflect a rich interaction between emerging levels of linguistic competence, raising considerations for diagnosis and rehabilitation of language disorders.
authors: Rachel M
authors: RM
authors: Theodore
authors: Katherine
authors: K
authors: Demuth
authors: Stefanie
authors: S
authors: Shattuck-Hufnagel
mesh_terms: D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007807:Language Tests; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D013060:Speech; D013068:Speech Production Measurement