title: The development of acoustic cues to coda contrasts in young children learning American English.
abstract: Research on children's speech perception and production suggests that consonant voicing and place contrasts may be acquired early in life, at least in word-onset position. However, little is known about the development of the acoustic correlates of later-acquired, word-final coda contrasts. This is of particular interest in languages like English where many grammatical morphemes are realized as codas. This study therefore examined how various non-spectral acoustic cues vary as a function of stop coda voicing (voiced vs. voiceless) and place (alveolar vs. velar) in the spontaneous speech of 6 American-English-speaking mother-child dyads. The results indicate that children as young as 1;6 exhibited many adult-like acoustic cues to voicing and place contrasts, including longer vowels and more frequent use of voice bar with voiced codas, and a greater number of bursts and longer post-release noise for velar codas. However, 1;6-year-olds overall exhibited longer durations and more frequent occurrence of these cues compared to mothers, with decreasing values by 2;6. Thus, English-speaking 1;6-year-olds already exhibit adult-like use of some of the cues to coda voicing and place, though implementation is not yet fully adult-like. Physiological and contextual correlates of these findings are discussed.
authors.affiliation: Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53211, USA. songjy@uwm.edu
authors.forename: Jae Yung
authors.initials: JY
authors.lastname: Song
authors.forename: Katherine
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Demuth
authors.forename: Stefanie
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Shattuck-Hufnagel
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D005931:Glottis / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007802:Language; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D009622:Noise; D010700:Phonetics; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology; D014831:Voice / Q000502:physiology