RE/PMT may be applied clinically with the expectation of medium-size effects on the child's rate of intentional communication acts after 6 months of intervention. The approach warrants further investigation with modifications, such as delivery at higher intensity levels.

This study examines whether speech sound production of toddlers with Down syndrome (DS) is on par with or more severely impaired than that of mental age (MA) peers with developmental delay due to aetiologies other than Down syndrome at two points within an 18-month period near the onset of spoken word production. The utterances of 26 children with DS, aged 24–33 months, with a mean MA of 14.3 months, originally studied by Fey et al. (2006) and Warren et al. (2008) were compared to those of a group of 22 children with similar intellectual and communication delay but no DS (NDS). Phonological measures included the size of the consonant inventory, syllable shape complexity, and number of communication acts with canonical vocalizations. At Time 1, the DS group performed as well as or better than the NDS group on these measures of speech production. At Time 2, 18 months later, the DS group was behind the NDS group on the same measures. Results extended the pattern of more severe impairment in children with DS than NDS peers commonly noted in expressive language to measures of phonological development.

This study examined whether young children produce an emerging sound (/s/) more accurately in a weak syllable if the syllable is trochaic (i.e., in a strong-weak syllable pattern) than if it is nontrochaic (i.e., either preceding a strong syllable or following another weak syllable). Eight typically-developing 28- to 32-month-old children who sometimes misproduced /s/ imitated three-syllable nonwords with /s/ as the onset in five syllable types: (a) word-medial stressed, (b) word-medial unstressed following a stressed syllable (i.e., trochaic), (c) word-initial nontrochaic, (d) word-medial nontrochaic, and (e) word-final nontrochaic. As predicted, /s/ was more accurate in trochaic than nontrochaic contexts. Among nontrochaic contexts, /s/ was more accurate in word-final position than in word-initial or word-medial positions. Production of /s/ in word-final nontrochaic syllables was similar to that in word-medial trochaic syllables. Metrical structure and final syllable prominence together predicted which weak syllables are most likely to contain consonant errors.

A cooperative boardgame task was used to examine how native speakers use prosodic structure to resolve syntactic ambiguity in discourse context. The game task required two speakers to use utterances from a predetermined set to negotiate the movement of gamepieces to goal locations. In one condition, the discourse contained two situations that had to be described using the same syntactically ambiguous word sequence. In the other condition, an identical syntactically ambiguous structure was used to describe only one situation. Sentences that could describe two situations had an ambiguous prepositional phrase attachment as in ‘‘I want to move the square with the triangle,’’ in which the move involved either a combined square-and-triangle piece or a triangle pushing a square to another position. Sentences describing only one situation involved only a cylinder pushing the square as in ‘‘I want to move the square with the cylinder.’’ Phonological analyses and phonetic analyses of duration and fundamental frequency were compared. Results indicate that speakers used prosodic phrasing to reflect situational syntactic ambiguity. Examples of relatively high and low variability in production will be discussed. [Work supported by NIH grant MH-51768, NZ/USA Cooperative Science Programme grant CSP95/01, Marsden Fund grant VUW604, and NIH research DC-00029.]