The role of stress and articulatory difficulty in children's early productions

Interactions between stress level and articulatory difficulty as influences on children's early words were investigated in an elicited imitation task. Thirty-two 26-month-old children were asked to imitate nonsense-word stimuli containing target syllables that varied in articulatory difficulty and level of stress. Both factors had significant effects on aspects of the children's imitations, although the relative contributions of each differed for whole word avoidance, syllable omissions, and accuracy of production. Implications of these differential effects for accounts of children's early productions are discussed.