Phonetic imitation by school-age children

Abstract

Phonological representations such as phoneme and feature are often assumed in prevailing linguistic theories. However, little is known about how these representations are formed during the course of language acquisition. The current study aims to investigate developmental changes of phonological representations by examining how children imitate fine phonetic details of recently heard speech. Previous studies have shown that adult speakers implicitly imitate the phonetic properties of recently heard speech (e.g., Goldinger, 1998; Pardo, 2009). Recently, Nielsen (2011) showed that phonetic imitation was generalized at phoneme and feature levels, providing support for sub-lexical representations. The current study extends these findings and examines whether school-age children manifest similar patterns of phonetic imitation. The experiment employed the imitation paradigm in which participants' speech is compared before and after they are exposed to model speech with extended VOT on the target phoneme /p/. A preliminary analysis of data revealed that participants produced longer VOTs after being exposed to model speech with extended VOTs. The change was generalized to new instances of the target phoneme /p/ and the new phoneme /k/, indicating that sub-lexical units were also involved in phonetic imitation by children.