On the Development of Motor Control in Speech: Evidence from Studies of Temporal Coordination

Abstract

One of the most important aspects of research into the timing of children's speech is that it provides a potential field for testing theories of the development of speech as a motor skill. Increasingly mature temporal organization of speech units is assumed to reflect increasing coordination of the motor gestures for speech. The durations of speech segments corresponding to phones vary with phonetic context according to regular principles. One effect is that just as each syllable tends to become shorter as the number of syllables in a word increases, so one finds that the more phonemes in a word, the shorter a given phonetic segment tends to be. Such changes in duration are not uniform across all segments, and the durations of some segments do not change in certain phonetic contexts. Which segments are changed in duration, and by how much, depends on the manner and place of articulation of the segment itself and on its surrounding context.