Segmental timing of young children and adults

Abstract

Young children's speech is compared to (a) adult-to-adult (A-A) normal speech, and (b) adult-to-adult (A-A) slow speech, and (c) adult-to-child (A-C) speech by measuring durations and variability of each segment in consonant-vowel-consonant CVC (CVC consonant-vowel-consonant) words. The results demonstrate that child speech is more similar to A-C speech than A-A slow speech in that it exhibits a large portion of long vowel duration in a word. However, child speech but differs from A-C speech by more noticeable lengthening of consonants. In addition, child speech exhibits an inconsistent timing relationship across segments within a word whereas durational variation in consonants and vowels was correlated in A-A speech and A-C speech. The results suggest that temporal patterns of young children are quite different from those of adults, and provide some evidence for lack of motor control capability and great variance in articulatory coordination.

Keywords:

• Children
• speech
• phonetics