Keywords
Speech production, young children, acoustic structures, voiceless fricatives
Abstract
Scientists have made great strides toward understanding the mechanisms of speech production and perception. However, the complex relationships between the acoustic structures of speech and the resulting psychological percepts have yet to be fully and adequately explained, especially in speech produced by younger children. Thus, this study examined the acoustic structure of voiceless fricatives /f, s, b/ produced by adults and typically developing children from 3 to 6 years of age in terms of multiple acoustic parameters durations, normalized amplitude, spectral slope, and spectral moments. It was found that the acoustic parameters of spectral slope and variance commonly excluded from previous studies of child speech were important acoustic parameters in the differentiation and classification of the voiceless fricatives, with spectral variance being the only measure to separate all four places of articulation. It was further shown that the sibilant contrast between /s/ and /b/ was less distinguished in children than adults, characterized by a dramatic change in several spectral parameters at approximately five years of age. Discriminant analysis revealed evidence that classification models based on adult data were sensitive to these spectral differences in the five-year-old age group. © 2005 Acoustical Society of America. DOI: 10.1121/1.2010407
Original Publication Citation
Nissen, S. L., & Fox, R. A. (2005). Acoustic and spectral characteristics of young children’s fricative productions: A developmental perspective. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 118, 2570-2578.
BYU ScholarsArchive Citation
Nissen, Shawn L. and Fox, Robert Allen, "Acoustic and spectral characteristics of young children’s fricative productions: A developmental perspective" (2005). Faculty Publications. 7360.
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/facpub/7360
Document Type
Peer-Reviewed Article
Publication Date
2005-10
Publisher
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
Language
English
College
David O. McKay School of Education
Department
Communication Disorders
Copyright Status
© 2005 Acoustical Society of America
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