Prosodic Influences on Children's Grammatical Morphology

Like younger, normally developing children, children who are language impaired frequently omit grammatical morphemes in their phrase productions. These omissions from phrases bear some similarity to omissions of weak syllables from multisyllabic words. These similarities concern prosodic properties; specifically, initial weak syllables are particularly challenging in both cases. Omissions of word- and phrase-initial weak syllables may occur because of perceptual or production constraints that are operative in the immature language system. Clinical procedures whereby the salience of grammatical morpheme models is increased and the difficulty of production of grammatical morphemes is controlled via manipulation of prosodic contexts may enhance children's learning of grammatical morphemes.