A comparative analysis of pausing in child and adult storytelling

Redford, Melissa A.

doi:10.1017/s0142716411000877

Cited by 26 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…As is common in child data (Redford, 2013), pauses were frequent in our participants' productions. Altogether, 567 pauses appeared in the 568 sentences evaluated here, of which 45% preceded the verb and 55% followed the verb.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 66%

“…Here, children displayed a focus marking strategy not reported for adult speakers of Finnish by showing an increased frequency of pauses not only after words in (non-contrastive or contrastive) narrow focus, but also preceding them. While children generally pause more frequently than adults (e.g., Redford, 2013), the present data showed significant effects of information structure, with the use of pauses increasing specifically in the context of narrow focus. Interestingly, this finding is reminiscent of Romøren and Chen's (2015) observation that Dutch 4- to 5-year-olds showed longer pause durations before narrow focus constituents, while the same strategy was less prevalent in adult speech.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 46%

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Acquiring Complex Focus-Marking: Finnish 4- to 5-Year-Olds Use Prosody and Word Order in Interaction

2016

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Using a language game to elicit short sentences in various information structural conditions, we found that Finnish 4- to 5-year-olds already exhibit a characteristic interaction between prosody and word order in marking information structure. Providing insights into the acquisition of this complex system of interactions, the production data showed interesting parallels to adult speakers of Finnish on the one hand and to children acquiring other languages on the other hand. Analyzing a total of 571 sentences produced by 16 children, we found that children rarely adjusted input word order, but did systematically avoid marked OVS order in contrastive object focus condition. Focus condition also significantly affected four prosodic parameters, f0, duration, pauses and voice quality. Differing slightly from effects displayed in adult Finnish speech, the children produced larger f0 ranges for words in contrastive focus and smaller ones for unfocused words, varied only the duration of object constituents to be longer in focus and shorter in unfocused condition, inserted more pauses before and after focused constituents and systematically modified their use of non-modal voice quality only in utterances with narrow focus. Crucially, these effects were modulated by word order. In contrast to comparable data from children acquiring Germanic languages, the present findings reflect the more central role of word order and of interactions between word order and prosody in marking information structure in Finnish. Thus, the study highlights the role of the target language in determining linguistic development.

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 66%

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 46%

Acquiring Complex Focus-Marking: Finnish 4- to 5-Year-Olds Use Prosody and Word Order in Interaction

2016

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“…Speech materials were produced by nine children (3 F, 6 M; mean age: 5.5 years) and their mothers (mean age: 31 years) 1 ; see Redford (2012) for details. Talkers were instructed not to interrupt the person telling the story, although minor interruptions occurred.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The talkers selected here were 5-year-old children and adults, due to these groups’ substantial differences in fluency and articulation (Redford, 2012; Bernthal et al, 2008). Fluency is strongly related to prosody, including duration, rate, pausing, and pitch, but is not independent of segmental pronunciation (Bloodstein, 1995).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Age-Related Changes to Spectral Voice Characteristics Affect Judgments of Prosodic, Segmental, and Talker Attributes for Child and Adult Speech

Dilley

Wieland

Gamache

et al. 2013

J Speech Lang Hear Res

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Purpose As children mature, changes in voice spectral characteristics covary with changes in speech, language, and behavior. Spectral characteristics were manipulated to alter the perceived ages of talkers’ voices while leaving critical acoustic-prosodic correlates intact, to determine whether perceived age differences were associated with differences in judgments of prosodic, segmental, and talker attributes. Method Speech was modified by lowering formants and fundamental frequency, for 5-year-old children’s utterances, or raising them, for adult caregivers’ utterances. Next, participants differing in awareness of the manipulation (Exp. 1a) or amount of speech-language training (Exp. 1b) made judgments of prosodic, segmental, and talker attributes. Exp. 2 investigated the effects of spectral modification on intelligibility. Finally, in Exp. 3 trained analysts used formal prosody coding to assess prosodic characteristics of spectrally-modified and unmodified speech. Results Differences in perceived age were associated with differences in ratings of speech rate, fluency, intelligibility, likeability, anxiety, cognitive impairment, and speech-language disorder/delay; effects of training and awareness of the manipulation on ratings were limited. There were no significant effects of the manipulation on intelligibility or formally coded prosody judgments. Conclusions Age-related voice characteristics can greatly affect judgments of speech and talker characteristics, raising cautionary notes for developmental research and clinical work.

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“…If silence occurred adjacent to a fricative, sonorant, or vocalic segment, then the pause interval was taken to be the entire interval of silence. If a silent interval occurred with a vowel-initial stop consonant and or an unreleased final stop, then it was only delimited as a pause if (1) it was heard as a pause, and (2) the interval was longer than necessary to accommodate stop closure, which was arbitrarily but consistently defined as 150þ ms. Our procedure for identifying pauses has been used successfully in other published work (Redford, 2013) and the 150 ms interval is within the range of consonant durations (especially, stop closure þ release durations) observed in school-aged children's running speech (see Fig. 1).…”

Section: Rate and Duration Measurementsmentioning

confidence: 95%

The perceived clarity of children's speech varies as a function of their default articulation rate

Redford

2014

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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The current study investigated whether variation in children's default articulation rate might reflect individual differences in the development of articulatory timing control, which predicts a positive correlation between rate and perceived clarity (motor skills hypothesis), or whether such variation is better attributed to speech external factors, which predicts that faster rates result in poorer target attainment (undershoot hypothesis). Two different speech samples were obtained from 54 typically developing children (5;2 - 7;11). Six utterances were extracted from each sample and measured for articulation rate and segmental duration. Fourteen adult listeners rated the utterances for clarity (enunciation). Acoustic correlates of perceived clarity, pitch, and vowel quality were also measured. The findings were that age-dependent and individual differences in children's default articulation rates were due to segmental articulation and not to suprasegmental changes. The rating data indicated that utterances produced at faster rates were perceived as more clearly articulated than those produced at slower rates, regardless of a child's age. Vowel quality measures predicted perceived clarity independently of articulation rate. Overall, the results support the motor skills hypothesis: Faster default articulation rates emerge from better articulatory timing control.

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A comparative analysis of pausing in child and adult storytelling

Cited by 26 publications

References 16 publications

Acquiring Complex Focus-Marking: Finnish 4- to 5-Year-Olds Use Prosody and Word Order in Interaction

Acquiring Complex Focus-Marking: Finnish 4- to 5-Year-Olds Use Prosody and Word Order in Interaction

Age-Related Changes to Spectral Voice Characteristics Affect Judgments of Prosodic, Segmental, and Talker Attributes for Child and Adult Speech

The perceived clarity of children's speech varies as a function of their default articulation rate

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