Coarticulatory effects on “the” production in child and adult speech

Abstract

If prosodic words are the principle units of speech planning and production, then the production of an unstressed grammatical word should be especially influenced by the adjacent context word with which it is chunked. The current study tested this prediction in child and adult speech to investigate the development of the speech plan. Anticipatory and perseveratory influences on determiner vowel production were investigated in simple SVO sentences produced by 5-year-old children and college-aged adults. Although children’s productions indicated greater perseveratory influences than adults’ productions, anticipatory effects were consistently stronger than perseveratory effects across age groups. The results suggest that, by age 5 years, children chunk determiners along morphosyntactic boundaries just like adults.

A psycholinguistic method for measuring coarticulation in child and adult speech

“…Acoustics Kallay and Redford's (2018) acoustic study showed coarticulatory effects of the subsequent vowel on the unstressed vowel of the determiner (i.e., schwa), albeit in a larger sample of speakers (11 children and 9 adults) and across more different sentence types. Here, acoustic information for the sentences under investigation is presented, again for schwa in the determiner.…”

“…Vowel-to-vowel coarticulatory effects have been shown to span unstressed syllables in adult and child speech (e.g., Magen, 1997;Grosvald, 2009;. For example, Kallay and Redford (2018) investigated both anticipatory and carryover effects on the production of an unstressed determiner in simple subject-verbthe-object sentences elicited from 5-year-olds and collegeaged adults (e.g., Maddy packs the gak). The stressed vowels in the verb and object noun were varied to be either /ae/ or /oʊ/ in order to examine the effect of the three-way contrast (= jaw height, tongue advancement, and lip rounding) on the production of the unstressed determiner vowel (= schwa).…”

“…A subset of AV recorded sentences produced by 12 speakers from the Kallay and Redford (2018) study were used in the current study. The forward-gated version of the prediction task used the frame sentence, Maddy packs the_____, where the object noun was either gak or goat.…”

“…Sentences with /g/-onset nouns were chosen in preference to those with /b/-onset nouns to allow for lip rounding as a potential cue to upcoming vowel identity. Sentences with /g/-onset nouns were also preferred to those with /s/-onset nouns, since the acoustic results from Kallay and Redford (2018) suggested that /g/-onsets may allow for more degrees of freedom in jaw opening during schwa production than /s/-onsets. Three good productions of Maddy packs the gak and Maddy packs the goat were identified for each speaker, starting with the second repetition.…”

“…Here, acoustic information for the sentences under investigation is presented, again for schwa in the determiner. Unlike in Kallay and Redford (2018), the current analyses are based on formant dynamics. F1, F2, and F3 values were extracted at 10 equally spaced intervals across the entire duration of schwa.…”