Identifying prosodic contrasts in utterances produced by 4-, 7-, and 11-year-old children.
OBJECTIVE
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.


METHODS
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.


CONCLUSIONS
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.
Patel
Rupal
R
Department of Speech Language Pathology and Audiology, Northeastern University, 106 Forsyth Building, Boston, MA 02115, USA. r.patel@neu.edu
Brayton
Julie T
JT
D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D002648:Child; D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D032882:Comprehension; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D013060:Speech; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D055815:Young Adult