title: The influence of utterance position on children's production of lexical stress.
abstract: Previous studies reporting acoustical data on children's production of lexical stress examined words produced in isolation (i.e., with no carrier phrase) or in utterance-final position. In such contexts, the final syllable of the words being examined was also the utterance-final syllable. Syllables produced in utterance-final position are known to be longer in duration and lower in intensity and F(0) compared to other syllables within utterances. Therefore, utterance-final effects may have obscured previous results on children's production of stress. Twenty children at approximately 6 years of age produced novel trochaic and iambic words in utterance-final and utterance-non-final position. Comparing productions across the two utterance positions suggested that reliance upon the utterance-final context was a confounding factor in past studies. Utterance-final position facilitated the iambic pattern of duration (short-long) and the trochaic pattern of intensity and F(0) (high-low). Utterance position sometimes affected trochees differently than iambs, especially in the duration of word-final syllables. The results are discussed in terms of past explanations of utterance position effects on acoustic characteristics of syllables.
authors.affiliation: University of Maine, Orono, ME 04469, USA. allan.b.smith@umit.maine.edu
authors.forename: Allan B
authors.initials: AB
authors.lastname: Smith
authors.forename: Michael P
authors.initials: MP
authors.lastname: Robb
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010699:Phonation; D010700:Phonetics; D012016:Reference Values; D012660:Semantics; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013061:Speech Acoustics