Children's articulatory and auditory awareness of differences between vowel sounds

Thirty-four normal 4th grade children were asked to nonverbally describe tongue positions for American vowels in terms of tongue height and tongue advancement. The same children then rated all pairs of vowels in terms of perceptual-similarity. Results indicate that children are unable to provide an articulatory description of vowels in terms of conventional phonetic descriptors, but they perform in an adult-like fashion when they perceptually sort out differences in vowel quality perceived auditorily between paired vowels.