A developmental study of speech production: Data on vowel imitation and sentence recitation

Abstract

Ten subjects in each of five groups (4-, 6-, 10-, and 12-year-old children as well as young adults) participated in a study involving the imitation of 15 synthesized vowels and the repetition of three simple sentences. This report emphasizes spectrographic data for the two youngest groups and the adult group. In the vowel imitation task, the subjects could recreate the relative formant structure of the targets, but the children in particular tended to produce allen (non-English) vowels as the proximal English vowels. Plotting of the formant data for different age-sex groups in the F1−F2 plane revealed linear orientations, i.e., isovowel lines for unnormalized data. Standard deviations for the first two formant frequencies of the imitations were commensurate with published data on difference limens for formant frequency. The sentence repetitions were used primarily to evaluate the stability of temporal patterns. Both the inter- and intrasubject standard deviations of temporal segments tended to be larger for the children than for the adults, but even some 4-year-olds occasionally fell within the adult range of variability. [Work supported by NINCDS.]

Imitation in a Second Language Relies on Phonological Categories but Does Not Reflect the Productive Usage of Difficult Sound Contrasts

“…The degree of imitation is then assessed by comparing participants’ baseline productions before the task to these repetitions (Fowler, Brown, Sabadini, & Weihing, 2003; Goldinger, 1998; Goldinger & Azuma, 2004; Mitterer & Ernestus, 2008; Nielsen, 2011; Shockley, Sabadini, & Fowler, 2004). On the other hand, in explicit imitation tasks, listeners are encouraged to sound as similar as possible to the model speaker they hear when producing the stimuli (Alivuotila, Hakokari, Savela, Happonen, & Aaltonen, 2007; Hao & de Jong, 2016; Kent, 1973, 1974; Kent & Forner, 1977; Repp & Williams, 1985; Rojczyk, 2013; Rojczyk et al, 2013; Zaja̧c & Rojczyk, 2014). In the present study, we used the latter approach to examine L2 learners’ imitation, and crucially investigated how imitation performance relates to performance in other tasks in which each of the two subcomponents involved in imitation are probed in isolation (i.e., phonetic categorization in perception and word reading without a model speaker in production).…”