Compensatory Strategies in the Developmental Patterns of English /s/: Gender and Vowel Context Effects.
J Speech Lang Hear Res
; 60(3): 571-591, 2017 03 01.
Article
em En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-28241209
ABSTRACT
Purpose:
The developmental trajectory of English /s/ was investigated to determine the extent to which children's speech productions are acoustically fine-grained. Given the hypothesis that young children have adultlike phonetic knowledge of /s/, the following were examined (a) whether this knowledge manifests itself in acoustic spectra that match the gender-specific patterns of adults, (b) whether vowel context affects the spectra of /s/ in adults and children similarly, and (c) whether children adopt compensatory production strategies to match adult acoustic targets.Method:
Several acoustic variables were measured from word-initial /s/ (and /t/) and the following vowel in the productions of children aged 2 to 5 years and adult controls using 2 sets of corpora from the Paidologos database.Results:
Gender-specific patterns in the spectral distribution of /s/ were found. Acoustically, more canonical /s/ was produced before vowels with higher F1 (i.e., lower vowels) in children, a context where lingual articulation is challenging. Measures of breathiness and vowel intrinsic F0 provide evidence that children use a compensatory aerodynamic mechanism to achieve their acoustic targets in articulatorily challenging contexts.Conclusion:
Together, these results provide evidence that children's phonetic knowledge is acoustically detailed and gender specified and that speech production goals are acoustically oriented at early stages of speech development.
Texto completo:
1
Base de dados:
MEDLINE
Assunto principal:
Acústica da Fala
/
Fonética
/
Linguagem Infantil
/
Caracteres Sexuais
Idioma:
En
Ano de publicação:
2017
Tipo de documento:
Article