Phonology and phonetics in the development of schwa in Dutch child language

Strengthening of underlying schwas to full vowels is a salient characteristic of early child productions. In this paper the development of schwa in longitudinal Dutch child language data is discussed. I explore the possibility that schwa-strengthening is motivated by utterance-final lengthening, which in Dutch leads to a transfer of length from an utterance-final schwa to the vowel preceding schwa. Language learners will replace an utterance-final schwa with a full vowel as long as they lack control over this length-transferring process.