Purpose: The purpose of this study is to characterize the local (utterance-level) temporal regularities of child-directed speech (CDS) that might facilitate phonological development in Spanish, classically termed a syllable-timed language. Method: Eighteen female adults addressed their 4-year-old children versus other adults spontaneously and also…

We tested German nine-month-olds' reliance on pitch and metrical stress for segmentation. In a headturn-preference paradigm, infants were familiarized with trisyllabic words (weak-strong-weak (WSW) stress pattern) in sentence-contexts. The words were presented in one of three naturally occurring intonation conditions: one in which high pitch was…

The purpose of the dissertation is to examine Mandarin-speaking children's acquisition of a syntax-dependent phonological rule Tone 3 Sandhi (T3S). A Tone 3 (low dipping tone) is changed to a Tone 2 (mid rising tone) when it is followed by another Tone 3. Application of T3S in fact involves a complex process. In setting up the prosodic domains…

Recognizing word boundaries in continuous speech requires detailed knowledge of the native language. In the first year of life, infants acquire considerable word segmentation abilities. Infants at this early stage in word segmentation rely to a large extent on the metrical pattern of their native language, at least in stress-based languages. In…

Previous studies have suggested that intonation development in infants and toddlers reflects an interaction between physiological and linguistic influences. The immediate background research for this study, however, was based on vocalizations that were only one syllable in length. By extending the analysis to polysyllabic utterances, the present…

Describes vocalizations of five 13-month-old infants. Data are reported on syllable shape, vowel-like and consonant-like production in context and time, periodic utterances, complex babbling sequences, recurrent phonetic forms, fundamental frequency, and intonation types. Results are consistent with data from other studies and support theory of…

An analysis was made of the correspondence between intonation and the larger and smaller movements accompanying two-syllable and longer utterances. Synchrony between peaks of intonation and movement pattern was found and is used to argue for a performative basis for early two-word productions. (Author/EJS)

Study of the phonological systems in the language of twins, two-and-a-half years old. (VM)

A study of the utterances of young children, aged 7 to 22 months, is described. These utterances, varying in length from one to 17 syllables, contain only suprasegmental information because the verbal content was incomprehensible to hearers who were not acquainted with the child and the situation in which the utterances occured. In the corpus,…

Fundamental frequency, duration, and amplitude measures were extracted from stressed and unstressed syllables in interword and intraword comparisons. Analysis of target stress patterns revealed no difference between acoustic marking of stress by 6 adults and 22 toddlers. Findings indicate that children generally control these variables to derive…

A model of early phonotactic and prosodic development in Swedish children is described. Although the model is based on data about the phonology of language disordered children, it is valid for normal development and useful for diagnosis of phonological impairment. Data included a cross-sectional study of 31 language disordered children aged 4 to 8…

Two studies examined children's perceptual biases in extracting or identifying words from the stream of speech. In one study, evidence for the salience of stressed and final syllables was found. Young children less frequently omitted those syllables from their productions and produced unstressed and nonfinal syllables less accurately. A second…

This paper deals with methods and models appropriate to the systematic linguistic study of the child's acquisiton of phonology. Sections I through IV present a review of previous studies in the field, discuss the usefulness of the concept of "innateness," discriminate between phonetic and phonological ability, and discuss the concept of discrete…

This study discusses the nature of rhythm as it may apply to speech and language, reviews some of the literature on the development of rhythm, and presents some thoughts relating these findings to specific examples of children's speech. There is evidence to support the view that one need not look at the exact rhythm of any utterance, but only for…