Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

effect which is potentially universal in its crosslinguistic distribution, subject however to
language-specific variation in its implementation, and most robust in higher-level
prosodic constituents. To the extent that final lengthening is universal, we might expect
final strength effects to be equally widespread.
3.1.2. Psycholinguistic prominence
In addition to their well-documented phonetic enhancement, final syllables are
also known to exhibit special salience in a psycholinguistic sense. Kehoe and Stoel-
Gammon’s 1997 study of prosodic acquisition demonstrates this well. In this study of the
truncation patterns of children acquiring English, the authors show that in truncated
productions of polysyllabic words, children are most likely to retain internal stressed
syllables and final syllables, stressed and unstressed. They characterize their results as
follows (Kehoe and Stoel-Gammon 1997: 120-121) 42 :
In WS words, children produced the stressed syllable; in SS, SWS, and SWS words, children
produced both stressed syllables; in WSW, SWW, and WSWW words, children produced the
stressed syllable and the unstressed syllable in word-final position; and in SWSW, SWSW, and
SSWW words, children preserved both stressed syllables and the unstressed syllable in word-final
position. Children preserved a medial rather than a final unstressed syllable in their truncations
only infrequently.
42 Where S refers to a syllable with primary stress, S to a syllable with secondary stress, and W to an
unstressed syllable.
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