Ratings of speech naturalness of children ages 8-16 years.
The focus of this cross-sectional study was the investigation of Speech Naturalness (speech that sounds normal or natural to the listener) of 60 normal speaking children and adolescents between the ages of 8 and 16 years. 26 naive adult listeners rated the naturalness of videotaped and computer-presented speech samples, using a 9-point-Likert rating scale (1: highly natural sounding speech and 9: highly unnatural sounding speech). The children and adolescents who participated as speakers were distributed among 5 age groups (8, 10, 12, 14, and 16 yr.) with 6 boys and 6 girls in each group. Each child demonstrated normal articulation, language, voice, and speech fluency skills. Age and sex comparisons indicated boys' and girls' speech was rated comparably; however, 8-yr.-olds' speech was rated as significantly less natural than those of 12-, 14-, and 16-yr.-olds. Preliminary ratings of Speech Naturalness for normal speaking children were presented. Suggestions for the clinical application of the findings as a target criterion in treatment programs with communicatively impaired children were suggested. Replication with a larger and more representative sample is in order.
Central Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant, MI 48859, USA. Cough1ss@cmich.edu
Suzanne
S
Coughlin-Woods
Mark E
ME
Lehman
Paul A
PA
Cooke
D000293:Adolescent; D000367:Age Factors; D002648:Child; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D012737:Sex Factors; D013065:Speech Intelligibility / Q000502:physiology*; D013068:Speech Production Measurement / Q000379:methods*