THE ROLE OF COARTICULATION IN THE PERCEPTION AND PRODUCTION OF SPEECH BY YOUNG CHILDREN (3 TO 7 YEARS).
Item
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Title
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THE ROLE OF COARTICULATION IN THE PERCEPTION AND PRODUCTION OF SPEECH BY YOUNG CHILDREN (3 TO 7 YEARS).
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Identifier
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AAI8601681
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identifier
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8601681
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Creator
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NITTROUER, SUSAN.
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Contributor
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Michael Studdert-Kennedy
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Date
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1985
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Speech Communication
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Abstract
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Simultaneous movement of the articulators used to produce neighboring segments (or, coarticulation) is ubiquitous in speech. Its consequences can be seen in the acoustic structure of the signal, and perceptual experiments have demonstrated that adult listeners are sensitive to these consequences. However, whether coarticula- tion is a mandatory property of speech production, and use of its consequences mandatory in perception, remains debatable. The purpose of this study was to help define the role of coarticulation in the perception and production of speech.;Forty subjects (eight children at each of the ages 3, 4, 5, and 7 years, and eight adults) identified tokens from a synthetic / / - /s/ continuum followed by one of four natural vocalic portions: /i/ or /u/, spoken with transitions appropriate for either / / or /s/. Chil- dren demonstrated larger shifts in fricative phoneme boundaries as a function of vocalic transition than adults, but relatively smaller shifts as a function of vowel quality; responses were less consistent for children than for adults; and, differences between children and adults decreased as children increased in age.;In a second experiment, samples were obtained from the eight adults and from two children in each age group uttering the syllables / i/, /si/, / u/, and /su/. Both the center of gravity of the fricative spectrum and second formant values, at several sample points, were measured. Results for all children, regardless of age, were similar with respect to adult utterances: vowel context more strongly affec- ted their fricative spectra, but vocalic formant transitions were reduced. These results suggest that, in fricative-vowel sequences, children tend to coarticulate (or coproduce) the two segments more strongly than adults.;Overall, these results indicate that coarticulatory effects in pro- duction, and sensitivity to these effects in perception, are present at as young as 3 years of age. This finding was interpreted as sugges- ting that coarticulation is a madatory property of speech production, and that its acoustic consequences contribute to speech perception even in a child at the early stages of learning to speak. Developmen- tal trends suggested that the organization of speech gradually becomes more segmental in nature, with changes occurring earlier in perception than in production.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Speech & Hearing
