“A metrical template account of children’s weak syllable omissions from multisyllabic words” by Louann Gerken discusses the phenomenon of children’s often leaving out weakly stressed syllables from multisyllabic words, omitting weak syllables from initial positions more likely than from internal or final word positions. As foundation for her research, the author refers to three hypotheses offered as an explanation for this “omission pattern”. The two of them proposes that the phenomenon reflects “innate perceptual biases either to ignore initial weak syllables or to encode word-final syllables”. Yet the third one, the SW Production Template Hypothesis, in contrast proposes that the reason for syllable omission is a certain template that children use, which implies production of strong syllable followed by an optional weak syllable.

To research and compare the theories the author uses in her investigations The Perceive Last Syllable Hypothesis which proposes that all children have an inborn bias to distinguish or pick out stressed and word-final syllables developed by Slobin, 1973; Echols & Newport, 1992; Echols, 1993 and to the Ignore First Syllable Hypothesis derived from suggestions by Cutler (1990; Cutler & Norris, 1988) for adult lexical access, and by Gleitman & Wanner (1982; Gleitman, Gleitman, Landau & Wanner, 1988) for language acquisition.

The importance of the provided research lies in, as the author mentions, in the implication for “children’s function morpheme omissions and for the relation of metrical and segmental production templates”. It’s significant not only for demonstrating proofs of performance constraints in children’s utterances, but more for showing how linguistic regularities encoded by the children are revealed in production. Moreover, it helps to reflect the development of the linguistic representations.

To urge the advantage of the SW Production Template Hypothesis over the other two,
Louann Gerken presents two experiments conducted.  To contrast the three mentioned above hypotheses, young two-year old were asked to imitate novel four-syllable words with SWWS and WSWS stress patterns. 26 developing middle-class children from the NY area were found through the newspaper advertisements, posters, and by word-of-mouth to participate in the experiment. The children were visited by researchers in their homes. The second experiment was designed for testing children’s preservations segmental interpretation. The materials were the same as those used in first experiment with only small disparities, while the procedures were perfectly identical. Both Experiments 1 and 2 supported the SW Production Template Hypothesis over the other two.

The author states that the research demonstrates the possibility of “creating models of young children’s speech production processes and testing these models on experimental and naturalistic data”. The present research corresponds with a diversity of other observations revealing the significance of children’s speech planning and production systems as main factors influencing the form of their utterances.