Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

Kehoe and Stoel-Gammon suggest that the increased perceptual salience of final
syllables due to final lengthening is a possible source for this pattern, but that perceptual
difficulty with non-prominent material cannot ultimately tell the full story. Firstly, it has
been shown that children do in fact accurately perceive the material they otherwise omit
from truncated productions. Segmental material from deleted syllables (e.g. their onset
C’s) indeed often appears in truncated forms, reinforcing this point. Furthermore, in
children’s earliest truncations, it is the rightmost stressed syllable in a word which is most
often the one to surface. When the adult form has final stress, the final syllable along
surfaces, and when stress is penultimate, children’s most frequent early truncations
preserve both the stressed and the final unstressed syllables (p. 123). All this suggests that
there is some additional importance attached to the right-edge adjacent material in the
word which goes beyond simple relative ease of perception of the segmental material
located there. Kehoe and Stoel-Gammon argue that children’s phonological
representations are relatively intact (compared to those of adults), but that production
constraints give rise to the omission of all but a few privileged portions of the word. This
enhanced psycholinguistic salience accorded to prosodic heads and edge-adjacent
material can be modeled using the parametrized faithfulness constraints now familiar
from a variety of OT approaches to positional neutralization. Kehoe and Stoel-Gammon
are not specific, however, as to the precise nature of the psycholinguistic salience of
124