Haskins Publications

Number	606
Year	1987
Drawer	11
Entry Date	11/17/1999
Authors	Nittrouer, S., & Studdert-Kennedy, M.
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Publication	Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, Vol. 30, 319-329.
url	http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0606.pdf
Abstract	Adult listeners are sensitive to the acoustic variations that result from a speaker's coarticulating (or coproducing) phonetic segments. The development of such sensitivity in young children was charted by examining their responses to coarticulatory effects in fricative-vowel syllables. Children aged 3, 4, 5, & 7 years (N = 8 each group) & adults (N = 12) identified tokens from a synthetic /(esh)/-/s/ continuum followed by one of four natural vocalic portions: /i/ or /u/, spoken with transitions appropriate for either /(esh)/ or /s/. Children demonstrated larger shifts in fricative phoneme boundaries as a function of vocalic transition than adults, but relatively smaller shifts as a function of vowel quality; responses were less consistent for children than for adults; & differences between children & adults decreased as children increased in age. Overall, these results indicate that perceptual sensitivity to certain coarticulatory effects is present at as young as three years of age. Moreover, the decrease in the effect of the vocalic transitions with age suggests that, contrary to a commonly held view, the perceptual organization of speech may become more rather than less segmental as the child develops.
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