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Acquisition of speech rhythm in first language
Leona Polyanskaya1, Mikhail Ordin1
1Fakultät für Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft, Univeristät Bielefeld, University Street 25, Bielefeld, NRW 33615, Germany leona.polyanskaya@uni-bielefeld.de, mikhail.ordin@gmail.com.
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
|October 3, 2015
Summary
As children acquire English, their speech rhythm develops to become more stress-timed, reaching adult patterns by age 11-12. This developmental shift reflects the acquisition of language-specific phonetic timing.
Area of Science:
- Linguistics
- Developmental Psychology
- Phonetics
Background:
- Speech rhythm is a key feature of spoken language.
- Understanding the developmental trajectory of speech rhythm in language acquisition is crucial.
Purpose of the Study:
- To analyze the development of English speech rhythm in children compared to adults.
- To determine the age at which children achieve adult-like speech rhythm patterns.
Main Methods:
- Comparative analysis of speech rhythm in children and adults.
- Utilized a controlled speech elicitation paradigm for comparable sentence production.
- Focused on acoustic analysis of speech timing features.
Main Results:
- Speech rhythm in English becomes progressively more stress-timed during language acquisition.
- Children achieve adult-like speech rhythm between 11 and 12 years of age.
- Rhythm differences are not due to vocabulary or phonotactics, but phonetic timing development.
Conclusions:
- Language acquisition involves the development of language-specific phonetic timing.
- Children's speech rhythm maturation is a significant aspect of language development.
- The study provides insights into the phonological and phonetic changes during childhood language acquisition.
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