One way to study the properties of normal adult language is to focus on these properties in other populations in whom language is just developing or in whom it has broken down. This approach to the study of language depends on finding a common pattern across different language users that can give us insight into how language works as a whole. This dissertation research project will use three populations (young children with normally developing language, slightly older children with specific language impairment, and adults with nonfluent aphasia) to address what role prosody (e.g., the rhythm structure of words and sentences) plays in their speech and how mental representations of language affect the production of speech. Specifically, the research will examine a particular phenomenon common to the speech of these populations: the omission of initial unstressed syllables within multisyllabic words. Acoustic data will be used to investigate the question of whether, when children or language disordered populations omit these syllables, their mental representation of the prosody of the words remains intact, and how prosodic structure is preserved in their productions.
