ABSTRACT
On another view, children faced with production limitations might consciously or unconsciously “decide” to omit some part of an utterance that does not affect the meaning (e.g., Bates, 1976; Bloom, 1970). Thus, a child who produces “I want a cookie” as “Want cookie” preserves those sentential elements that maintain the core meaning of the intended utterances. The problem with this view is that it applies best to omissions, and even then, it does not apply well to omissions within words (Gerken, 1994a,b; Wijnen et al., 1994). Thus, reducing “hippopotamus” to [pamLs] does not preserve the meaning or intelligibility better than saying [h%po], although children are more likely to produce the former (e.g., Kehoe, 1995; Klein, 1978).
