The coarticulation-duration relationship in early Quechua speech

Abstract

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.

Advancements of Phonetics in the 21st century: Quantitative data analysis

“…Carignan et al (2021) use linear, log-normal, and beta regression to model different articulatory variables, depending on whether they are bounded and/or right-skewed. Rosen (2005) argues that segment durations are log-normally distributed and should be analyzed as such, while phone duration or VOT have been modeled by Cychosz (2021); Goldrick et al (2011) using gamma regression, a type of GLMM used for continuous positive y.…”

Combining observational and experimental approaches to the development of language and communication in rural samples: Opportunities and challenges

“…In many rural communities, access to medical services is more challenging, and it is up to the researcher to establish this, which may be far from trivial. Cychosz (2021), for instance, attempted to measure children's hearing thresholds using the typical procedure whereby one asks the child to raise their hand when they hear tones of varying frequency; but some children would not raise their hand at all, despite no other evidence of hearing loss (i.e., oral speech delay), possibly because the children were afraid to make a mistake. It is also difficult to carry out standardized procedures, such as hearing or vision thresholds, in noisy or distracting environments where it is difficult to determine if lack of an effect is due to higher sensory thresholds or simply other distracting elements in the testing environment.…”