Abstract
An investigation of word-initial consonant cluster durations spoken by six children aged from 4 to 8 revealed only a weak association between maturity of production and chronological age (CA). This experiment was designed to see whether the children's speech maturity as judged by adults corresponded more closely to the instrumentally measured maturity of their consonant durations than either measure corresponded to CA. Elicited English monosyllables recorded during two periods one year apart were presented so that each child was paired with himself across the two years, and with other children within the same year. Using a definition of speech maturity emphasizing gestural integration and fluency, with less weight on phonemic adequacy and none on obviously age-related factors such as pitch and voice quality, 48 naive listeners judged which child of each pair spoke most maturely. Judgments of speech maturity correlated significantly both with predictions of the children's relative maturity derived from the similarity of their measured to adult norms, and with these predictions modified by impressions of the children's spontaneous speech. Neither the judgements nor the predictions correlated significantly with CA. Speech matured at very different rates for individual children, and actually decreased over the year for one.
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