Abstract
Davis and MacNeilage (1995) reported contextual influences on infants’ segmental production in which vowel production preference and error were strongly influenced by word level contexts. However, few studies have addressed the issue of contextual influences on supra‐segmental production in pre‐linguistic periods of acquisition. The present study investigated the influence of utterance length and utterance position on the size of f0 excursion in the babbling of English and Mandarin infants. Spontaneous babbling speech of four monolingual English infants and four monolingual Mandarin infants at the age of 8 and 14 months were collected. Canonical babbling syllables with either a falling or rising f0 contour were acoustically analyzed. The magnitude of f0 excursion size was calculated as the difference between maximum f0 and minimum f0 within a syllable. Results showed that F0 excursion size was significantly larger in monosyllables than in individual syllables of multisyllabic utterances. It is also larger in utterance final syllables than in non‐final syllables. The influence of age and ambient language properties of f0 will also be discussed. [Work supported by NSF 0844080.]
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