Voiceless alveolar stop coarticulation in typically developing 5-year-olds and 13-year-olds

Area of Science:

• Speech-language pathology
• Developmental linguistics
• Acoustic phonetics

Background:

• Lingual coarticulation, the influence of adjacent speech sounds on tongue articulation, is crucial for fluent speech production.
• Understanding developmental changes in coarticulation provides insights into the maturation of speech motor control.
• Previous research has explored coarticulation but with limited focus on specific age-related differences in lingual adjustments.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare vowel-on-consonant lingual coarticulation at [t] closure offset in 5-year-old children and 13-year-old adolescents.
• To determine if younger children adjust tongue shape to following vowels as extensively as adolescents.
• To investigate the impact of age on anticipatory coarticulation and articulatory variability.

Main Methods:

• Utilized midsagittal ultrasound imaging to capture tongue shape data.
• Analyzed tongue dorsum bunching during the production of [t]-vowel syllables ([i] and [a]).
• Compared coarticulatory patterns and within-speaker variability between 5-year-old and 13-year-old typically developing Scottish Standard English speakers.

Main Results:

• Both age groups demonstrated tongue dorsum bunching to coarticulate with following vowels.
• Younger children (5-year-olds) showed less consistent modification of bunching location compared to adolescents.
• Significantly greater token-to-token variability was observed in the 5-year-old group.

Conclusions:

• Vowel-on-[t] coarticulation development in children is influenced by the maturation of motor control.
• Articulatory constraints on the tongue limit lingual coarticulation in younger children.
• Findings are relevant for clinical speech-language pathology and emphasize the need for detailed phonetic descriptions across childhood development.