Developmental and regional influences on the production of stop closure voicing in late childhood

Abstract

Previous research in sociophonetics examining consonantal variation in American English has uncovered systematic regional differences in the production of voiced stop closures in intersonorant positions, suggesting that social factors can be the source of variation in the phonetic realization of voiced stops. The current study focuses on school-age children to establish both the developmental stability of voiced stops in late childhood and the impact of regional variation on the amount of voicing in stop closures. Based on the literature showing that the mastery of lexical stress contrastivity continues into adolescence, we hypothesized that systematic variation in the amount of stop closure voicing is commensurate with the development of stress control; this relationship is further mediated by regional variation documented in the speech of adults. Sentence productions from 48 girls in the age range 8–13 years representing three regional varieties spoken in Central Ohio, Western North Carolina, and Southeastern Wisconsin were analyzed in a set of temporal variables. Preliminary analyses show moderate correlations between child's age and the variables of interest. Over the course of the development, the relationship between stress contrastivity and the corresponding extent of stop closure voicing is also influenced by regional variation.