Patterns of acquisition of native voice onset time in English-learning children

Abstract

Learning to speak involves both mastering the requisite articulatory gestures of one’s native language and learning to coordinate those gestures according to the rules of the language. Voice onset time (VOT) acquisition illustrates this point: The child must learn to produce the necessary upper vocal tract and laryngeal gestures and to coordinate them with very precise timing. This longitudinal study examined the acquisition of English VOT by audiotaping seven children at 2 month intervals from first words (around 15 months) to the appearance of three-word sentences (around 30 months) in spontaneous speech. Words with initial stops were excerpted, and (1) the numbers of words produced with intended voiced and voiceless initial stops were counted; (2) VOT was measured; and (3) within-child standard deviations of VOT were measured. Results showed that children (1) initially avoided saying words with voiceless initial stops, (2) initially did not delay the onset of the laryngeal adduction relative to the release of closure as long as adults do for voiceless stops, and (3) were more variable in VOT for voiceless than for voiced stops. Overall these results support a model of acquisition that focuses on the mastery of gestural coordination as opposed to the acquisition of segmental contrasts.

Ocorrência de dessonorização no desvio fonológico: relação com fonemas mais acometidos, gravidade do desvio e idade

“…This way, there was no evidence of the influence of age on the use of the analyzed process. This finding disagrees with other studies (23)(24)(25) , which mention the presence of a more stabilized production of the [voice] feature in older children, and it is probably associated to a greater maturity of the phonoarticulatory organs. That is, these authors, using data from typical speech, suggest a complex relation between the motor variability of speech and the language development in children with respect to time.…”

“…Alterations of a motor order were mentioned, since devoicing corresponds to a difficulty in coordinating glottic and supraglottic events, showing impairment in spatial-temporal organization of phonoarticulatory movements. Then, it may be assumed more difficulty in suppressing this process when compared to others (21)(22)(23) . Another study, which used acoustic analysis, shows that the fricative phonemes are less devoiced than plosive phonemes, confirming the present study (19) .…”

Temporal variability in sung productions of adolescents who stutter

“…They appear after voiced productions in infancy and take overall longer to be mastered in an adult-like manner than other types of VOT (Kewley-Port & Preston, 1974;Lowenstein & Nittrouer, 2008;Macken & Barton, 1980;Preston & Yeni-Komshian, 1967;Yu et al, 2015). Previous studies report that children from 4 to 11 years show longer and more variable VOTs than adults (e.g., Yu et al, 2015).…”

“…Therefore, VOT variability in fluent productions of song versus speech will be the focus of the present study. Moreover, we focus on voiceless stops as they present a challenging articulatory gestural configuration (e.g., Lowenstein & Nittrouer, 2008). We hypothesize that, if singing enhances the temporal coordination of laryngeal-oral movements (Jungblut et al, 2014), sung VOT should become more stable (i.e., less variable) in participants who stutter compared to their fluent spoken VOT productions.…”

Avaliações acústica e perceptiva de fala nos processos de dessonorização de obstruintes

“…Estudos fonológicos e fonéticos sobre a dessonorização referem a idade dos 5 anos como o momento de supressão do processo na aquisição normal do Português Brasileiro, podendo estar completamente superado antes disso 4,5 . A estratégia de dessonorização representa a dificuldade na coordenação dos eventos gló-ticos e supraglóticos 6,7 . Um atraso no início da…”