Infant-directed speech (IDS) is phonetically distinct from adult-directed speech (ADS): It is typically considered to have special prosody--like higher pitch and slower speaking rates--as well as unique speech sound properties, for example, more breathy, hyperarticulated, and/or variable consonant and vowel articulation. These phonetic features…

Studies of connected speech have repeatedly shown that the contextual predictability of a word is related to its phonetic duration; more predictable words tend to be produced with shorter duration, when other factors are controlled for (Aylett & Turk, 2004, 2006; Bell et al., 2003; Bell, Brenier, Gregory, Girand, & Jurafsky, 2009; Gahl,…

This study focuses on a trilingual toddler's ability to differentiate her Tagalog, Spanish and English productions on phonological/phonetic grounds. Working within the articulatory phonology framework, the word-initial segments produced by the child in Tagalog, Spanish and English words at age 1;10 were narrowly transcribed by two researchers and…

The phonetic characteristics of canonical babbling produced by Korean- and English-learning infants were compared with consonant and vowel frequencies observed in infant-directed speech produced by Korean- and English-speaking mothers. For infant output, babbling samples from six Korean-learning infants were compared with an existing English…

Past research has indicated that English-learning infants begin segmenting words from speech by 7.5 months of age (Jusczyk & Aslin, 1995). More recent work has demonstrated, however, that 7.5-month-olds' segmentation abilities are severely limited. For example, the ability to segment vowel-initial words from speech reportedly does not appear until…

Children's early word productions often differ from the target form, sometimes exhibiting vowel lengthening when word-final coda consonants are omitted (e.g., "dog" /d[open o]g/ [arrow right] [d[open o]:]). It has typically been assumed that such lengthening compensates for a missing prosodic unit (a mora). However, this study raises the…

Examines whether systematic differences exist in babbling and first words of infants from different language backgrounds (English, French, Japanese and Swedish) and asks whether differences result from the phonetic structure of the languages. Statistically significant differences discerned in the babbling phonetic selection indicates that phonetic…

Analyzes the late babbling productions of a French child and compares them with data from similar studies of English and Thai children. Shows that although the French child and his English counterparts share some universal phonetic preferences, a selective, language-specific phonetic acquisition takes place during the babbling stage. (Author/MES)

Investigation of the perception and production of English voiceless fricatives in normally developing monolingual 3- to 5-year-olds (N=12) partially supported the hypothesis that certain sound substitutions by older children are perceptually based substitutions, typified by poor discrimination, while others are phonetic substitutions--phonemic…

Examines the relationship between phonetic substitution patterns in child speech and sound change patterns in dialects of adult language, basing an explanation of these phenomena on acoustic data and language universals. (AM)

This is a report on the deviant phonological system of a 4-year-old child. Although this system is characterized by deletions, assimilations, simplifications, and distortions, there is a regularity in the system which lends itself to systematic phonological analysis. Based on an examination of sample phonological deviations, the following rules…

This project began with a theory about the prediction of errors in childrens' attempts to pronounce utterances modeled for them by adults. Subjects were children from 15 to 54 months old in all positions in the family. The sample from each child was an unprompted utterance judged to be an attempt to say something in English. Differences between…

Presents two analyses of deviant phonological systems. The one based on production evidence alone accounts for (1) differences in surface behavior of a set of phonetic segments with three possible phoneme sources, and (2) obstruent clusters across morpheme boundaries. The "substitution analysis" identifies the child's underlying representations…

Describes and examines three tests using an infant speech identification (ISI) procedure, in which English language environment infants, two- and six-year-old children, and adults were tested for their identification of sounds on a native (voice/voiceless bilabial stop) and a nonnative (prevoiced/voiced bilabial stop) speech continuum. (31…

This revised second edition of the 1966 bibliography has been brought up to early 1975 by the addition of more than 1200 new items, reflecting the rapid development of the field of linguistics during the previous decade. The items in this edition total 3,000. As in the first edition, the items are chosen so as to provide a comprehensive guide to…