Do children understand adults better or themselves? A perceptual study of Polish /s, ʂ, ɕ/

Abstract

Developmental studies of speech perception have typically used adult productions or synthetic speech as stimuli. Little is known about how children perceive their own speech, however. Further, few studies of sibilant fricative perception have explored complex sibilant inventories. This work assessed perception of the sibilants /s, ʂ, ɕ/ in 32 monolingual native speakers of Polish, 3–8 years of age. Children participated in a picture-naming task to identify minimal or near-minimal triplets with the fricatives in initial and medial position, e.g., [kasa] “cash point”, [kaʂa] “groats”, [kaɕa] “Cathe, prop.name.” They subsequently labeled their own word productions, and the words as produced by an adult. Children’s labeling was generally quite accurate for the adult speaker, with the lowest accuracy rating of ca. 75% seen in the youngest listeners. When labeling themselves, the children were less accurate, with average performance at about 50% in children younger than 55 months. Across all ages, reaction times decreased in the order /ʂ/ > /s/ > ɕ/. Future work will obtain perceptual judgments of the children’s productions from other listeners and obtain acoustic measures of the fricatives to explore perception-production relationships.Developmental studies of speech perception have typically used adult productions or synthetic speech as stimuli. Little is known about how children perceive their own speech, however. Further, few studies of sibilant fricative perception have explored complex sibilant inventories. This work assessed perception of the sibilants /s, ʂ, ɕ/ in 32 monolingual native speakers of Polish, 3–8 years of age. Children participated in a picture-naming task to identify minimal or near-minimal triplets with the fricatives in initial and medial position, e.g., [kasa] “cash point”, [kaʂa] “groats”, [kaɕa] “Cathe, prop.name.” They subsequently labeled their own word productions, and the words as produced by an adult. Children’s labeling was generally quite accurate for the adult speaker, with the lowest accuracy rating of ca. 75% seen in the youngest listeners. When labeling themselves, the children were less accurate, with average performance at about 50% in children younger than 55 months. Across all ages, reaction time...