Howson PJ, Redford MA. A Cross-Sectional Age Group Study of Coarticulatory Resistance: The Case of Late-Acquired Voiceless Fricatives in English.
JOURNAL OF SPEECH, LANGUAGE, AND HEARING RESEARCH : JSLHR 2022;
65:3316-3336. [PMID:
35998285 PMCID:
PMC9913133 DOI:
10.1044/2022_jslhr-21-00450]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/19/2021] [Revised: 01/20/2022] [Accepted: 05/21/2022] [Indexed: 06/15/2023]
Abstract
PURPOSE
As a class, fricatives are more "resistant" to consonant-vowel coarticulation than other English sounds. This study investigates the relative coarticulatory resistance of /θ, s, ʃ/ in child and adult speech to better understand the acquisition of individuated speech sounds.
METHOD
Ten 5-year-old children, seven 8-year-old children, and nine college-age adults produced [əFV] sequences in carrier phrases, where F was /θ/, /s/, or /ʃ/ and V was /æ/, /i/, or /u/. In Experiment 1, coarticulation was perceptually indexed: 65 adults predicted the target stressed vowel based on forward-gated audiovisual speech samples for a subset of four speakers from each age group. In Experiment 2, dynamic spectral measures of the /əFV/ sequences were analyzed using smoothing spline analysis of variance to again test for vowel effects on fricative articulation across age groups.
RESULTS
The perceptual results indicated that fricatives blocked vowel-vowel coarticulation across speaker age groups. Contrary to expectation, vowels were most accurately predicted when F was /s/ and not when it was /ʃ/ or /θ/ across age groups. Acoustic results indicated the expected biomechanically motivated /ʃ/ > /s/ > /θ/ coarticulatory resistance hierarchy in adults' speech. By contrast, /ʃ/ > /s/ were similarly influenced by context in 8-year-olds' speech, and the results from 5-year-olds' speech suggested an influence of order of acquisition in that /θ/ was surprisingly resistant to coarticulation.
CONCLUSION
The study results are taken to suggest that a temporal constraint on fricative articulation interacts with biomechanical constraints during development to influence patterns of coarticulation in school-age children's speech.
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