Prosodic Development During the Early School-Age Years

This study used a cross-sequential design to identify developmental changes in narrative speech rhythm and intonation. The aim was to provide a robust, clinically relevant characterization of normative changes in speech prosody across the early school-age years.

Structured spontaneous narratives were elicited annually from 60 children over a 3-year period. Children were aged 5-7 years at study outset and then were aged 7-9 years at study offset. Articulation rate, prominence spacing, and intonational phrase length and duration were calculated for each narrative to index speech rhythm; measures of pitch variability and pitch range indexed intonation. Linear mixed-effects (LME) models tested for cohort-based and within-subject longitudinal change on the prosodic measures; linear regression was used to test for the simple effect of age-in-months within year on the measures.

The LME analyses indicated systematic longitudinal changes in speech rhythm across all measures except phrase duration; there were no longitudinal changes in pitch variability or pitch range across the school-age years. Linear regression results showed an increase in articulation rate with age; there were no systematic differences between age cohorts across years in the study.

The results indicate that speech rhythm continues to develop during the school-age years. The results also underscore the very strong relationship between the rate and rhythm characteristics of speech and so suggest an important influence of speech motor skills on rhythm production. Finally, the results on pitch variability and pitch range are interpreted to suggest that these are inadequate measures of typical intonation development during the school-age years.