Phonological Processes in Speech Addressed to Children

Shockey, Linda; Bond, Ζ. S.

doi:10.1159/000259996

Cited by 56 publications

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“…One of the characteristics of spontaneous speech, it will be recalled, is the high frequency of phonological elisions and assimilations (G. Brown 1977, Labov 1972, Milroy 1980. Some studies have reported that child-directed speech, too, is replete with such distorting processes (Bard andAnderson 1983, 1991;Shockey and Bond 1980) which is consistent with the view that this style of speech lies on a general continuum with adult-directed casual speech. Other studies, however, have reported lower frequency of distorting phonological transformations in speech to infants than in speech to adults (Bernstein-Ratner 1984a,b).…”

Section: The Infant's Speech Environmentsupporting

confidence: 63%

Segmentation problems, rhythmic solutions

Cutler

1994

Lingua

118

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The lexicon contains discrete entries, which must be located in speech input in order for speech to be understood; but the continuity of speech signals means that lexical access from spoken input involves a segmentation problem for listeners. The speech environment of prelinguistic infants may not provide special information to assist the infant listeners in solving this problem. Mature language users in possession of a lexicon might be thought to be able to avoid explicit segmentation of speech by relying on information from successful lexical access; however, evidence from adult perceptual studies indicates that listeners do use explicit segmentation procedures. These procedures differ across languages and seem to exploit language-specific rhythmic structure. Efficient as these procedures are, they may not have been developed in response to statistical properties of the input, because bilinguals, equally competent in two languages, apparently only possess one rhythmic segmentation procedure. The origin of rhythmic segmentation may therefore lie in the infant's exploitation of rhythm to solve the segmentation problem and gain a first toehold on lexical acquisition. Recent evidence from speech production and perception studies with prelinguistic infants supports the claim that infants are sensitive to rhythmic structure and its relationship to lexical segmentation.

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Section: The Infant's Speech Environmentsupporting

confidence: 63%

Segmentation problems, rhythmic solutions

Cutler

1994

Lingua

118

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“…Shockey and Bond (1980) in speech to 2-to 4-year-old children and speech to adults. They found that in British English, mothers use single segment phonological reduction more when speaking to their child than when speaking to an experimenter.…”

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confidence: 96%

“…However, these reports on phonetic reduction in infant-and child-directed speech investigated either word duration or emphasis (Bortfeld & Morgan, 2010;Fisher & Tokura, 1995;Pate & Goldwater, 2011), mild reduction processes in speech directed at toddlers (Shockey & Bond, 1980), they did not provide quantitative data on reduction degree and frequency Anderson, 1983, 1994;Stoel-Gammon, 1984) or focused on read instead of spontaneous speech (Dilley et al, 2013). Hence, they did not study the occurrence of pronunciation variants that are so reduced when compared to their full form that they could be classified as different words by infants.Moreover, several of these studies Anderson, 1983, 1994;Shockey & Bond, 1980) focused on speech directed at children who have already developed lexical representations for a large number of words. Importantly, degree of reduction may change across age or developmental stage of the child, like many other variables in infant-directed speech (e.g.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Pronunciation Variation in Infant-Directed Speech: Phonetic Reduction of Two Highly Frequent Words

Lahey

Ernestus

2013

Language Learning and Development

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In spontaneous conversations between adults, words are often pronounced with fewer segments or syllables than their citation forms. The question arises whether infant-directed speech also contains phonetic reduction. If so, infants would be presented with speech input that enables them to acquire reduced variants from an early age. This study compared speech directed at 11-and 12-month-old infants with adult-directed conversational speech and adult-directed read speech. In an acoustic study, 216 tokens of the Dutch words allemaal and helemaal from speech corpora were analyzed for duration, number of syllables and vowel quality. In a perception study, adult participants rated these same materials for reduction and provided phonetic transcriptions. The results show that these two words are frequently reduced in infant-directed speech, and that their degree of reduction is comparable to conversational adult-directed speech. These findings suggest that lexical representations for reduced pronunciation variants can be acquired early in linguistic development. 3An important component of language acquisition is the learning of words and their meanings.Before infants can attach meanings to words, they must acquire the ability to recognize a given word across different contexts. This is a complicated task, as each token of a word is acoustically different. Pronunciation variation can, for instance, be caused by speaker gender, voice characteristics and accent or dialectical variation. This raises the question of how infants learn to cope with pronunciation variation.In spontaneous conversations between adults, another common cause of pronunciation variation is reduction: words are often pronounced with fewer segments or syllables than their citation forms (for an introduction to the phenomenon of reduction, see Ernestus & Warner, 2011). For instance, the word yesterday can be pronounced in South-West American English as [jɛʃei]. Phonetic reduction leads to great variability in speech. Johnson (2004) showed that in a corpus of American English, no less than 20% of word tokens were pronounced with at least one segment missing, and 6% with at least one syllable missing. Similar results have been found for Dutch spontaneous speech (Schuppler, Ernestus, Scharenborg & Boves, 2011). In this study, we investigate whether highly reduced forms are prevalent in infant-directed speech, and we discuss the implications of this type of pronunciation variation for the building of a lexicon.Despite the high frequency of occurrence of reduced pronunciation variants, these forms normally do not seem to hinder communication. Adult listeners appear to understand these variants without any problem, at least when they are heard in context (Ernestus, Baayen & Schreuder, 2002). This raises the question of when infants can start learning to process reduced variants. In this study we investigated whether words are also reduced in speech to 11-and 12-month-old infants, that is whether highly reduced pronunciation variants occur in infant-di...

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“…Final consonant deletion is a common feature of typically developing children's speech until the age of three (Grunwell, 1997). Additionally, final consonant devoicing occurs in many languages (Locke, 1983), and in some languages, word-final consonants have disappeared over time (Hock, 1975, cited in Locke, 1983, or have been partially replaced by glottal stops.For example, Shockey and Bond (1980) found that British mothers replaced wordfinal [t] with a glottal stop 44% of the time while talking to their children. In line with these indications, adults are more likely to confuse newly learnt words that differ word finally than word initially, indicating less focus on word final consonants (Creel & Dahan, 2010).…”

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confidence: 99%

Spoken Word Classification in Children and Adults

Carroll

Myers

2011

J Speech Lang Hear Res

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Spoken Word Classification 3Abstract Purpose: Preschool children often have difficulties in word classification, despite good speech perception and production. Some researchers suggest they represent words using phonetic features rather than phonemes. We examine whether there is a progression from feature based to phoneme based processing across age groups, and whether responses are consistent across tasks and stimuli. Method:In Study 1, 120 3 to 5 year old children completed three tasks assessing use of phonetic features in classification, with an additional 58 older children completing one of the three tasks. In Study 2, all of the children, together with an additional adult sample, completed a nonword learning task. Results:In all four tasks, children classified words sharing phonemes as similar. In addition, children regarded words as similar if they shared manner of articulation, particularly word-finally. Adults also showed this sensitivity to manner, but across the tasks there was a pattern of increasing use of phonemic information with age.Conclusions: Children tend to classify words as similar if they share phonemes or share manner of articulation word finally. Use of phonemic information becomes more common with age. These findings are in line with the theory that phonological representations become more detailed in the preschool years. Spoken Word Classification 4 Spoken Word Classification 5 Spoken Word Classification in Children and AdultsThere is a body of evidence that children tend to classify words sharing phonetic features as similar (Snowling, Hulme, Smith, and Thomas, 1994). Some researchers argue that this reflects a fundamental difference in phonological representations of young children in comparison to those of adults (Storkel, 2002), while others argue that phonological representations are adult-like from the second year of life (Bailey & Plunkett, 2002;Swingley, 2009). This paper investigates whether children's phonological classification responses are consistent across different ages, tasks and stimuli. Predictable changes with age that are consistent across a range of tasks and stimuli would strengthen the argument that phonological representations change in the preschool years. Skills at different ages: Phonological skills in infancy and early childhood Speech Perception and Production in Infancy.There is a clear contrast between the good speech perception abilities shown by infants and the difficulties in sound segmentation and classification shown by three and four year old children. Even 4 month old children appear to perceive phonemes categorically, (Eimas, Siqueland, Jusczyk, & Vigorito, 1971). However, some studies have suggested that infants do not always process detailed phonetic information when learning new words. For example, 14 month old infants do not seem to detect a mispronunciation of a newly Spoken Word Classification 6 learnt word, while 8 month old infants (who are not yet linking words and objects) do detect the change, apparently showing greater sensitivity than ...

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Phonological Processes in Speech Addressed to Children

Cited by 56 publications

References 0 publications

Segmentation problems, rhythmic solutions

Segmentation problems, rhythmic solutions

Pronunciation Variation in Infant-Directed Speech: Phonetic Reduction of Two Highly Frequent Words

Spoken Word Classification in Children and Adults

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