The emergence of mature gestural patterns in the production of voiceless and voiced word-final stops.

The organization of gestures was examined in children's and adults' samples of consonant-vowel-stop words differing in stop voicing. Children (5 and 7 years old) and adults produced words from five voiceless/voiced pairs, five times each in isolation and in sentences. Acoustic measurements were made of vocalic duration, and of the first and second formants at syllable center and voicing offset. The predicted acoustic correlates of syllable-final voicing were observed across speakers: vocalic segments were shorter and first formants were higher in words with voiceless, rather than voiced, final stops. In addition, the second formant was found to differ depending on the voicing of the final stop for all speakers. It was concluded that by 5 years of age children produce words ending in stops with the same overall gestural organization as adults. However, some age-related differences were observed for jaw gestures, and variability for all measures was greater for children than for adults. These results suggest that children are still refining their organization of articulatory gestures past the age of 7 years. Finally, context effects (isolation or sentence) showed that the acoustic correlates of syllable-final voicing are attenuated when words are produced in sentences, rather than in isolation.

[1]  P. MacNeilage,et al.  Acquisition of correct vowel production: a quantitative case study. , 1990, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[2]  G. E. Peterson,et al.  Duration of Syllable Nuclei in English , 1960 .

[3]  W. V. Summers.  Effects of stress and final-consonant voicing on vowel production: articulatory and acoustic analyses. , 1987, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[4]  S Nittrouer,et al.  The emergence of mature gestural patterns is not uniform: evidence from an acoustic study. , 1993, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[5]  Anne Smith,et al.  Stability and patterning of speech movement sequences in children and adults. , 1998, Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR.

[6]  C. A. Ferguson,et al.  WORDS AND SOUNDS IN EARLY LANGUAGE ACQUISITION , 1975 .

[7]  Thorsten Piske,et al.  Phonological organization in early speech production: Evidence for the importance of articulatory patterns , 1997, Speech Commun..

[8]  Matthew Y. Chen.  Vowel Length Variation as a Function of the Voicing of the Consonant Environment , 1970 .

[9]  S. E. Krause,et al.  Developmental use of vowel duration as a cue to postvocalic stop consonant voicing. , 1982, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[10]  Roger W. Steeve,et al.  The physiologic development of speech motor control: lip and jaw coordination. , 2000, Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR.

[11]  A. House,et al.  The Influence of Consonant Environment upon the Secondary Acoustical Characteristics of Vowels , 1953 .

[12]  M Greenlee,et al.  Learning the phonetic cues to the voiced-voiceless distinction: a comparison of child and adult speech perception , 1980, Journal of Child Language.

[13]  V. Mann,et al.  Native language factors affecting use of vocalic cues to final consonant voicing in English. , 1992, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[14]  G. E. Peterson,et al.  Control Methods Used in a Study of the Vowels , 1951 .

[15]  M Donahue,et al.  Phonological constraints on the emergence of two-word utterances , 1986, Journal of Child Language.

[16]  S. E. Krause,et al.  Vowel duration as a perceptual cue to postvocalic consonant voicing in young children and adults. , 1982, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[17]  V L Gracco,et al.  Some organizational characteristics of speech movement control. , 1994, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[18]  H. Sussman,et al.  An acoustic analysis of the development of CV coarticulation: a case study. , 1999, Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR.

[19]  C Wardrip-Fruin,et al.  Developmental Aspects of the Perception of Acoustic Cues in Determining the Voicing Feature of Final Stop Consonants , 1984, Language and speech.

[20]  K. Stevens,et al.  Development of a Quantitative Description of Vowel Articulation , 1955 .

[21]  V. Mann,et al.  Use of vocalic cues to consonant voicing and native language background: The influence of experimental design , 1994, Perception & Psychophysics.

[22]  J E Flege,et al.  Chinese subjects' perception of the word-final English /t/-/d/ contrast: performance before and after training. , 1989, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[23]  Carol Stoel-Gammon,et al.  American and Swedish children's acquisition of vowel duration: effects of vowel identity and final stop voicing. , 2002, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[24]  J. Flege,et al.  Production of the word-final English /t/-/d/ contrast by native speakers of English, Mandarin, and Spanish. , 1992, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[25]  L. Raphael.  The physiological control of durational differences between vowels preceding voiced and voiceless consonants in English , 1975 .

[26]  N. Waterson,et al.  Child phonology: a prosodic view , 1971, Journal of Linguistics.

[27]  J. Kelso,et al.  The timing of articulatory gestures: evidence for relational invariants. , 1984, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[28]  W. Hardcastle,et al.  A Comparative Investigation of Coarticulation in Fricatives: Electropalatographic, Electromagnetic, and Acoustic Data , 1993, Language and speech.

[29]  P Tallal,et al.  Anticipatory coarticulation in the speech of adults and young children: acoustic, perceptual, and video data. , 1991, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[30]  R. Port,et al.  Cross-Language Phonetic Interference: Arabic to English , 1981 .

[31]  M. Schroeder.  Determination of the geometry of the human vocal tract by acoustic measurements. , 1967, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.