Chapter 12 – RETRACTED: PHONOLOGICAL RHYTHM: DEFINITION AND DEVELOPMENT

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the phonological rhythm. Rhythm is a form of structure that plays an organizing role in speech. Despite this all-inclusiveness of potential rhythmic sources in speech, some processes play a more dominant role than others in defining what is commonly felt to be the rhythm of a phrase. Speech communication is a motor–perceptual process, and thus, the rhythmic structures typically found in it are of the sort reasonable for speakers to produce and for listeners to perceive. The organizing rhythm of the spoken utterance can be influenced by virtually any element of speech that is subject to sequential patterning. Although children can be sensitive to some differences in prosodic contour as early as 18 months, their ability to produce consistent differences in stress-accent develops much later. Children become sensitive to the stress patterns of phrases at about the age of 2 years; however, they can begin to signal some accentual distinctions in their own speech soon after. Both their perception and their production of the full system of stress distinctions can remain inaccurate in some respects until the age of 12. Children's early polysyllabic utterances show a high frequency of unreduced syllables.