Two-year-olds’ acquisition of the possessive morpheme: An acoustic analysis

Previous research shows that 2-year-olds’ production of third person singular -s, but not plural -s, is affected by coda complexity, though both are more accurately produced in durationally longer utterance-final compared to utterancemedial position. This study explores these effects with possessive -s. Acoustic analysis of 10 two-years-olds’ elicited imitations examined children’s 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, but coda clusters were often simplified to -s singletons utterance-medially (e.g. Doug’s [d z]). The findings raise many questions about lexical and morphological development in typical and language-impaired populations.