Leiden University Student Repository

Veenstra, Laura (2025)

Acoustic Traces of Omitted Consonants: Evidence for Compensatory Lengthening in Child Speech

Bachelor thesis | Taalwetenschap (BA)

Young children often simplify consonant clusters in speech, reducing them to single consonants. But is there any acoustic information available that we do not perceive in these reduced clusters? Compensatory lengthening is one of the ways acoustic information gets preserved when a segment is deleted, where the duration of surrounding sounds increases to compensate for the omitted segment. Speech of two-year-old Dutch-learning children was analysed for compensatory lengthening following onset cluster reductions. Measurements focused on vowel and consonant durations in words with reduced clusters compared to phonemically similar singleton words. Results showed significantly longer durations of the remaining consonants in the reduced forms, indicating the presence of compensatory lengthening. This finding suggests that the omitted consonant is present in the underlying representation in the child’s lexicon.

Author

Veenstra, Laura

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Specialisation

Language and Cognition

Supervisors

Levelt, C.C.

ECTS Credits

10

Language

en