Results support the view that, although coarticulation degree decreases with age, children do not organize consecutive articulatory gestures with a uniform organizational scheme (e.g., segmental or syllabic). Instead, results suggest that coarticulatory organization is sensitive to the underlying articulatory properties of the segments combined.

Purpose: This study examines the temporal organization of vocalic anticipation in German children from 3 to 7 years of age and adults. The main objective was to test for nonlinear processes in vocalic anticipation, which may result from the interaction between lingual gestural goals for individual vowels and those for their neighbors over time.Method: The technique of ultrasound imaging was employed to record tongue movement at 5 time points throughout short utterances of the form V1#CV2. Vocalic anticipation was examined with generalized additive modeling, an analytical approach allowing for the estimation of both linear and nonlinear influences on anticipatory processes. Results: Both adults and children exhibit nonlinear patterns of vocalic anticipation over time with the degree and extent of vocalic anticipation varying as a function of the individual consonants and vowels assembled. However, noticeable developmental discrepancies were found with vocalic anticipation being present earlier in children's utterances at 3-5 years of age in comparison to adults and, to some extent, 7-year-old children.Conclusions: A developmental transition towards more segmentally-specified coarticulatory organizations seems to occur from kindergarten to primary school to adulthood. In adults, nonlinear anticipatory patterns over time suggest a strong differentiation between the gestural goals for consecutive segments. In children, this differentiation is not yet mature: Vowels show greater prominence over time and seem activated more in phase with those of previous segments relative to adults.

In previous research, mutual information (MI) was employed to quantify the physical information shared between consecutive phonological segments, based on electromagnetic articulography data. In this study, MI is extended to quantifying coarticulatory resistance (CR) versus overlap in German using ultrasound imaging. Two measurements are tested as input to MI: (1) the highest point on the tongue body and (2) the first coefficient of the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) of the whole tongue contour. Both measures are used to examine changes in coarticulation between two time points during the syllable span: the consonant midpoint and the vowel onset. Results corroborate previous findings reporting differences in coarticulatory overlap in German and across languages. Further, results suggest that MI used with the highest point on the tongue body captures distinctions related both to place and manner of articulation, while the first DFT coefficient does not provide any additional information regarding global (whole tongue) as opposed to local (individual articulator) aspects of CR. However, both methods capture temporal distinctions in coarticulatory resistance between the two time points. Results are discussed with respect to the potential of MI measure to provide a way of unifying coarticulation quantification methods across data collection techniques.

Развитие легких является многостадийным процессом, нарушение которого приводит к формированию респираторных нарушений у новорожденных. Цель исследованияоценить течение неонатального периода недоношенных новорожденных с каналикулярной и саккулярной стадией развития легких. Проведен ретроспективный анализ медицинской документации 46 недоношенных новорожденных с летальным исходом, имевших каналикулярную (n=28) и саккулярную стадии развития легких (n=18). Летальный исход в раннем неонатальном периоде чаще регистрировался у детей с каналикулярной стадией развития легких (75% против 44,5%), причина смерти по патологоанатомическому заключению: инфекция -61,5%, РДС -38,5%. У детей с саккулярной стадией развития более половины умерло на 8-28е сутки (55,6% против 25%), причиной смерти в 100% случаев явилась инфекция. Неонатальный период у всех детей характеризовался развитием респираторного дистресс-синдрома, пневмопатий, внутриутробной инфекцией и неврологической патологией. В первой группе чаще регистрировалась глубокая морфофункциональная незрелость головного мозга. По показателям газового гомеостаза и кислотно-основного состояния в первые часы жизни у всех недоношенных детей наблюдался смешанный и метаболический ацидоз. Гемограмма на 1-е сутки характеризовалась абсолютным лейко-и лимфоцитозом. В показателях красной крови наблюдалось снижение гемоглобина и гематокрита, что потребовало проведения гемотрансфузии в 2,7 раза чаще у новорожденных с каналикулярной стадией развития. На 5-е сутки жизни у всех новорожденных отмечено уменьшение количества тромбоцитов и лимфоцитов. Таким образом, недоношенные дети с различной стадией развития легких имеют похожее течение неонатального периода, однако при каналикулярной стадии развитие патологических процессов стремительнее вследствие большей незрелости ткани легкого; при саккулярной стадии -постепенное нарастание патологических процессов, что диктует необходимость поиска лабораторных диагностических критериев определения степени зрелости легких у новорожденных для разработки персонифицированного подхода интенсивной терапии и возможного повторного введения препаратов сурфактанта. Ключевые слова: недоношенные новорожденные, легкие, преждевременные роды, развитие легких, респираторный дистресс-синдром, неонатальная смертность.

Purpose: Coarticulatory effects in speech vary across development, but the sources of this variation remain unclear. This study investigated whether developmental differences in intrasyllabic coarticulation degree could be explained by differences in children's articulatory patterns compared to adults. Method: To address this question, we first compared the tongue configurations of 3- to 7-year-old German children to those of adults. The observed developmental differences were then examined through simulations with Task Dynamics Application, a Task Dynamics simulation system, to establish which articulatory modifications could best reproduce the empirical results. To generate syllables simulating the lack of tongue gesture differentiation, we tested three simulation scenarios. Results: We found that younger speakers use less differentiated articulatory patterns to achieve alveolar constrictions than adults. The simulations corresponding to undifferentiated control of tongue tip and tongue body resulted in (a) tongue shapes similar to those observed in natural speech and (b) higher degrees of intrasyllabic coarticulation in children when compared to adults. Conclusions: Results provide evidence that differences in articulatory patterns contribute to developmental differences in coarticulation degree. This study further shows that empirically informed modeling can advance our understanding of changes in coarticulatory patterns across age.