Back From the Future: Nonlinear Anticipation in Adults' and Children's Speech

Noiray, Aude; Wieling, Martijn; Abakarova, Dzhuma; Rubertus, Elina; Tiede, Mark

doi:10.1044/2019_jslhr-s-csmc7-18-0208

Cited by 25 publications

(53 citation statements)

References 106 publications

(107 reference statements)

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“…Regarding vocabulary, wide disparities across children from the same age are well-established (e.g., CDI reports within and across languages). Similar conclusions have been drawn regarding children's coarticulatory patterns (e.g., at 4 years of age in Nittrouer and Burton, 2005;Barbier et al, 2015; at 5 years of age in Zharkova, 2017; overlap between 3-4-year and 5-year olds in Noiray et al, 2019) and here again with no systematic age-related difference in coarticulatory degree across consonantal contexts.…”

Section: Age-related Versus Skill-based Descriptions Of Spoken Languasupporting

confidence: 87%

“…Based on our previous research, we expect differences in intra-syllabic coarticulation degree between children and adults but not necessarily between all child cohorts (Noiray et al, 2019). We also anticipated consonantal effects on children's lingual coarticulatory patterns within each age cohort as found in a preceding study investigating children's intra-syllabic coarticulation from the age of 3 (Noiray et al, 2018).…”

Section: The Development Of the Lexical Phonological And Motor Domainsmentioning

confidence: 85%

“…Looking specifically at lingual coarticulation, which regards the gestural organization of the tongue, some research has found a developmental decrease in vocalic anticipatory coarticulation over previous segments, within the syllables (e.g., Nittrouer et al, 1996;Zharkova et al, 2011;Noiray et al, 2018) and beyond the syllabic span (e.g., Nijland et al, 2002;Rubertus and Noiray, 2018). On the basis of these results, Noiray et al (2019) reasoned that spoken language fluency may entail a gradual narrowing of speech units toward smaller-sized units. In young children, vowels may represent building blocks, which children organize their speech around because of their perceptual salience, long duration, and earlier acquisition compared to consonants (e.g., Polka and Werker, 1994; review Nazzi and Cutler, 2019).…”

Section: What Are Children's Units Of Spoken Language Organizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To test for an effect of phonological awareness and vocabulary on children's coarticulation degree, we then employed Generalized Additive Modeling (GAM), a statistical approach allowing us to test for linear and nonlinear relationships (Winter and Wieling, 2016;Wood, 2017; for a comprehensive tutorial, see Wieling, 2018). To date, this approach has only been used in psycholinguistic research with adults (e.g., Strycharczuk and Scobbie, 2017;Wieling et al, 2017) and only recently in the developmental domain (Noiray et al, 2019). In this study, we were interested in the effect of three variables on the degree of coarticulation: RHYME, COMPOSITE_PA (a composite computed from the sum of the scores obtained for both phonemic awareness tasks: onset segment deletion and phoneme synthesis, see section "Descriptive Statistics for Phonological Awareness and Vocabulary"), and VOC.…”

Section: Descriptive Statistics For Phonological Awareness and Vocabumentioning

confidence: 99%

“…By integrated, we mean that the gradually acquired knowledge about different unit types and sizes does not constrain children to move from one organizational scheme to another (e.g., from holistic to segmental representation of speech or vice versa). Instead, this knowledge would integrate into an increasingly more complex and flexible language system allowing children to gradually manipulate a greater variety of phonetic compounds and structural organizations (Noiray et al, 2019). At the production level, this integrative process is exemplified in preschool-age children using gradients of coarticulation degree to accommodate the varying gestural demands of consecutive consonants and vowels (Noiray et al, 2019).…”

Section: An Integrated-interactive Approach To Skill Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Spoken Language Development and the Challenge of Skill Integration

et al. 2019

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The development of phonological awareness, the knowledge of the structural combinatoriality of a language, has been widely investigated in relation to reading (dis) ability across languages. However, the extent to which knowledge of phonemic units may interact with spoken language organization in (transparent) alphabetical languages has hardly been investigated. The present study examined whether phonemic awareness correlates with coarticulation degree, commonly used as a metric for estimating the size of children's production units. A speech production task was designed to test for developmental differences in intra-syllabic coarticulation degree in 41 German children from 4 to 7 years of age. The technique of ultrasound imaging allowed for comparing the articulatory foundations of children's coarticulatory patterns. Four behavioral tasks assessing various levels of phonological awareness from large to small units and expressive vocabulary were also administered. Generalized additive modeling revealed strong interactions between children's vocabulary and phonological awareness with coarticulatory patterns. Greater knowledge of sub-lexical units was associated with lower intra-syllabic coarticulation degree and greater differentiation of articulatory gestures for individual segments. This interaction was mostly nonlinear: an increase in children's phonological proficiency was not systematically associated with an equivalent change in coarticulation degree. Similar findings were drawn between vocabulary and coarticulatory patterns. Overall, results suggest that the process of developing spoken language fluency involves dynamical interactions between cognitive and speech motor domains. Arguments for an integrated-interactive approach to skill development are discussed.

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Section: Age-related Versus Skill-based Descriptions Of Spoken Languasupporting

confidence: 87%

Section: The Development Of the Lexical Phonological And Motor Domainsmentioning

confidence: 85%

Section: What Are Children's Units Of Spoken Language Organizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Descriptive Statistics For Phonological Awareness and Vocabumentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: An Integrated-interactive Approach To Skill Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Spoken Language Development and the Challenge of Skill Integration

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Evaluating generalised additive mixed modelling strategies for dynamic speech analysis

Sóskuthy

2021

Journal of Phonetics

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Generalised additive mixed models (GAMMs) are increasingly popular in dynamic speech analysis, where the focus is on measurements with temporal or spatial structure such as formant, pitch or tongue contours. GAMMs provide a range of tools for dealing with the non-linear contour shapes and complex hierarchical organisation characteristic of such data sets. This, however, means that analysts are faced with non-trivial choices, many of which have a serious impact on the statistical validity of their analyses. This paper presents type I and type II error simulations to help researchers make informed decisions about modelling strategies when using GAMMs to analyse phonetic data. The simulations are based on two real data sets containing F2 and pitch contours, and a simulated data set modelled after the F2 data. They reflect typical scenarios in dynamic speech analysis. The main emphasis is on (i) dealing with dependencies within contours and higher-level units using random structures and other tools, and (ii) strategies for significance testing using GAMMs. The paper concludes with a small set of recommendations for fitting GAMMs, and provides advice on diagnosing issues and tailoring GAMMs to specific data sets. It is also accompanied by a GitHub repository including a tutorial on running type I error simulations for existing data sets: https://github.com/soskuthy/gamm_strategies.

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The coarticulation-duration relationship in early Quechua speech

Cychosz

2021

Journal of Phonetics

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Evidence from acoustic and articulatory phonetics suggests that children coarticulate more than adults, but previous work has focused on the instantiation of coarticulation with phonology in a typologically homogeneous sample. The interplay of coarticulation with children's speaking rate has also been ignored. How do coarticulation and speaking rate (duration) interact over the course of development, and does the interaction manifest differently across distinct morphological environments? To answer this, the current study measured the speech patterns of bilingual Quechua-Spanish children (5-10 years) and adults. Coarticulation and duration were measured in two word environments, within morphemes and across morpheme boundaries. Unsurprisingly, adults consistently coarticulated more in shorter duration sequences, in both morphological environments. The children's coarticulation-duration patterns, however, varied by morphological environment. Additionally, the children's speech patterns, but not the adults', were sensitive to prosodic length: children produced increasingly shorter phones in words with more syllables. It is suggested that the differences between adults and children are attributable to adults' faster speaking rate and increased dominance in Quechua.

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Back From the Future: Nonlinear Anticipation in Adults' and Children's Speech

Cited by 25 publications

References 106 publications

Spoken Language Development and the Challenge of Skill Integration

Spoken Language Development and the Challenge of Skill Integration

Evaluating generalised additive mixed modelling strategies for dynamic speech analysis

The coarticulation-duration relationship in early Quechua speech

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