Perception of Vowel Segments by Children and Adults: A Preliminary Study of Segment Duration

Background/Objectives: Children's perception of phonemes differs from that of adults. Our purpose was to examine whether children's perception of vowels differs from that of adults because of differential emphasis on vowel segments (steady-state or transition), degree of coarticulation, or amount of information to make a perceptual judgment of the vowel. Methods: A, between-group cross-sectional design was employed. Twenty-four children aged four to nine years and 17 adults (aged 18 to 53) participated. Stimuli were three naturally produced syllables (/bɑ/, /bi/ and /bu/), presented in the sound field in entirety or segmented to isolate the formant transition or the vowel static formant center. Participants selected the vowel presented by choosing from corresponding pictures on a computer screen. Results: The data from children showed consistently less accuracy for vowel identification than adults for whole syllable and all segments except full transitions. Conclusions: Children were more attuned to acoustic change or contrast to enable vowel perception than adults, yet needed more extensive change before reaching adult performance.