“Prosodic Patterns in Children’s Multisyllabic Word Productions” by Margaret M. Kehoe reviews and discusses the results of “the influence of metrical and segmental effects on English-speaking children’s multisyllabic word productions” research. The author refers to the number of studies examining the phenomenon that has been conducted before. The author presents and assesses three approaches that are proposed in the literature by other authors on the account of the mentioned subject: (1) prosodic structure, (2) trochaic template, (3) perceptual salience.

The conducted examination of children’s truncation or syllable deletion patterns resulted in a number of important and strongly supported findings. The revealed results are that, firstly, non-final unstressed syllables are kept in less frequently than stressed and word-final unstressed syllables; secondly, word-internal syllables with sonorant onsets are preserved less often than word-internal unstressed syllables with obstruent onsets; next, unstressed syllables with reduced vowels are preserved less frequently than unstressed syllables with non-reduced vowels; and finally, left-sided stressed syllables are kept in less often than right-sided stressed syllables. The author also mentions the fact that examination of children’s stress patterns demonstrated that “children made greater numbers of stress errors in target words with irregular stress”.

Moreover, the author includes in the article the observation of how mentioned findings are implicated clinically, and the description of additional studies that have applied a metrical approach to clinical subjects. All the studies observed underline how important it is to have an accurate linguistic model of prosodic acquisition to base clinical intervention on.

The author refers to other scientists who have also been examining the subject and who provide the support and guidelines for her research (Velleman, Shriberg, Kwiatkowski, Rasmussen, Carter, Pigott, Kessler-Robb, Kent, Rosenbeck, Snow, Hochberg, etc.).