Prosodic and Morphological Effects on Word Reduction in Adults: A First Report

Several populations, such as normally developing children around the age of two years, children with language impairments, and adults with aphasia, all share a similar documented phenomenon in their language production: omitting syllables from their speech. Omitted syllables are most often those that are weakly stressed and that directly precede the primary stress of a word, yielding such stress-initial forms as nána for banána and ráffe for giráffe. This phenomenon is reflected in the English prosodic system; that is, in a polysyllabic word, primary stress most often occurs on the initial syllable. It follows that a stress-initial prosodic pattern would be the most common input that children perceive, and therefore learn to produce first, and also the stress pattern that impaired populations would default to when having difficulties in producing less frequent stress patterns. The question explored in this research is whether normal adults’ language production also mirrors these facts. That is, do adults, in conditions under which they might reduce words by omitting syllables, also default to these similar patterns? Participants in this study were asked to listen to a list of words and repeat them in a reduced form (as in Indianapolis ~ Indy, rhinoceros ~ rhino). Certain prosodic patterns were controlled for in order to systematically examine their effects on reduction patterns. Stimulus words contained two, three, or four syllables, with primary stress on the first, second or third syllable. Results suggest that syllable number and stress do in fact affect how adults reduce words, although it is clear that the relationship between these factors is complex.