This paper examines the acquisition of English fricatives and is a preliminary report on one aspect of the Child Phonology Project at Stanford University. A characterization of English fricatives is presented, followed by a summary of current information on their acquisition. Three sample hypotheses from the Stanford project are discussed in…

Part one of this study discussed the characteristics of errors involving single fricative consonants made by English children learning their first language. Here, the second part discusses the distinctive features of the single fricatives most commonly mispronounced, as well as the characteristics of errors with clustered fricatives. (34…

Reports a study determining whether significant differences in formant frequency are apparent when chronological age is compared with a measure of physiological age for children during the first six years. (TO)

Fourteen two-year-olds were presented with minimal word pairs in a new and efficient experimental perception paradigm. Data provide a view of relative difficulty of various minimal phonological contrasts for children. (CHK)

Patterns which partly resemble the proposed "fronting,""voicing," and "stopping" tendencies exist to a statistically significant degree in David Olmsted's large sample of child speech. Instead of the "voicing" pattern that has been suggested, however, voiced stops seem to be favored word-initially, but voiced fricatives are favored word-finally.…

Fricatives and affricates in different word positions and initial fricative clusters were elicited from three linguistically deviant children (ages five years, two months to seven years) and one normal child (age two years, nine months) by means of pictures depicting familiar objects. Data from two of the older children and the normal child are…

Thirty-five deaf children with hearing parents were tested for cheremic perception. Deaf children using sign language, like hearing children using spoken language, have more difficulty discriminating between lexical items that form minimal pairs in their language than between items that differ more. (SL)

Discusses the possibility that early linguistic experience affects infant speech perception and that this effect may be of practical consequence in later language learning. (EKN)

Three ten-step series of synthetic speech stimuli were constructed: /raem/ to laem/, /raem/ to /waem/, and /laem/ to /yaem/. Within each series, differences consisted of variations in onset frequency and slope of transition in the second or third formant. These stimuli were presented to 5- to 7-year-old children in identification…

The experiment reported here attempted to investigate the nature of both intrinsic, unlearned temporal parameters as well as learned, language-specific durational properties in the speech of young children. Developmental aspects of several temporal parameters were investigated in the speech of ten 2 1/2 to 3-year-old and ten 4 to 4 1/2-year-old…

This paper reports on a longitudinal study of the acquisition of the voicing contrast in English word-initial stop consonants, as measured by voice onset time. Four monolingual children were recorded at two week intervals, beginning when the children were about 1;6. Data provided evidence for three general stages: (1) the child has no contrast;…

The idea of semantic features has taken some force within psychology and a number of research workers have suggested that semantic acquisition is, in some manner, determined by semantic components. This notion has come to be called the "semantic feature hypothesis". An examination of the semantic feature hypothesis was made by testing 80…

Tests the universality hypothesis of language acquisition by asking young monolingual English and Japanese children to verify true affirmatives, false affirmatives, false negatives, and true negatives. The hypothesis was not supported in the case of Japanese-speaking children. A theory of cross-linguistic language acquisition is proposed.…

This paper reports on a longitudinal study of the acquisition of the voicing contrast in American-English work-initial stop consonants, as revealed through instrumental analysis of voice onset time characteristics. Four monolingual children were recorded at approximately two week intervals, beginning when the children were about 1;6. Data provide…

This document contains 21 reports on speech research relating to the following areas: phonology, speech development, speech perception, phonetics, short-term memory of tactile stimuli, reading, linguistic and paralinguistic interchange, computer processing of EMG (electromyographic) signals, pitch determination by adaptive autocorrelation method,…