Differences in the acoustic correlates of intonation in child and adult speech

Abstract

During speech perception, toddlers use prosodic cues, such as pitch, in order to identify the most salient/prominent information in the discourse. This process is critical in facilitating early word recognition and learning. How do children then use these acoustic cues in their own speech in comparison to mature adult speech? The motivation for this study is to examine the acoustic correlates of intonation employed by child (mean: 2.5 years) and adult speakers of English during a guided spontaneous production task. During an interactive game, we elicit a set of target nouns and label them as one of three types: (1) new, uttered for the first time by the participant, (2) given, previously uttered at least once by the participant, or (3) contrastive, uttered in direct opposition to a previously mentioned referent. Along with labeling the pitch accent, we measured f0 range, f0 slope, duration, and intensity for each target word under these varying conditions. These measurements allow us to compare the types of pitch accents used by children and adults, and how each group employs the acoustic correlates of intonation. Identifying how these parameters are used during production is an important step in understanding speech development in early language acquisition.