Anticipatory vowel coarticulation in child versus adult speech and a model of developmental change

Abstract

There is by now extensive evidence to suggest that coarticulatory domains are at least as large in children’s speech as in adults’ speech. A series of four experiments that investigated the temporal domain of anticipatory vowel articulation in speech elicited from school-aged children and college-aged adults under different conditions (random elicitation, repetitive elicitation, spontaneous speech) confirms previous findings and suggests a new one: anticipatory cues to an upcoming vowel ramp up more quickly in adult’s speech compared to children’s speech. Both the established and new findings can be modeled with reference to the windows that govern path selection in perceptual-motor space. Specifically, the findings are modeled as a developmental decrease in the size of a lookback window, to be interpreted as a developmental increase in inhibitory motor control. [Work supported by NIH under grant R01HD087452.]