Identifying Prosodic Contrasts in Utterances Produced by 4-, 7-, and 11-Year-Old Children

Autor/inn/en	Patel, Rupal; Brayton, Julie T.
Titel	Identifying Prosodic Contrasts in Utterances Produced by 4-, 7-, and 11-Year-Old Children
Quelle	In: Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 52 (2009) 3, S.790-801 (11 Seiten) PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	1092-4388
DOI	10.1044/1092-4388(2008/07-0137)
Schlagwörter	Suprasegmentals; Children; Age Differences; Cues; Adults; Monolingualism; North American English; Listening Comprehension; Identification; Sentences + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Child; Kind; Kinder; Age; Difference; Age difference; Altersunterschied; Stichwort; Amerikanisches Englisch; Hörverständnis; Identifikation; Identifizierung; Sentence analysis; Satzanalyse
Abstract	Purpose: Acquisition of prosodic control appears to evolve across development with younger children relying on durational cues and older children utilizing a broader spectrum of cues including fundamental frequency, intensity, and duration. This study aimed to determine whether unfamiliar listeners could identify prosodic contrasts produced by 4-, 7-, and 11-year-olds despite differences in acoustic cues used by each age group. Method: Thirty-six adult monolingual speakers of American English participated as listeners. A previous study yielded speech recordings from 12 children (2 male, 2 female from each age group) producing 2 linguistic contrasts, question-statement and contrastive stress, which served as listening stimuli. Results: In both tasks, listener accuracy ranged from 39.7% to 100% with significant differences between 4-year-olds and both older age groups. Listeners had difficulty deciphering the 4-year-olds' questions compared with statements and were more accurate in identifying contrastive stress placed on sentence-initial words compared with sentence-final words across all age groups. Conclusion: Although listeners identified prosodic contrasts produced by all 3 age groups, accuracy was significantly higher for 7- and 11-year-old productions. Findings are consistent with production studies that suggest relative stabilization of prosodic control between ages 4 and 7. Parallels between prosodic and segmental acquisition are discussed. (As Provided).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2017/4/10