Productive pitfalls in the phonetic pursuit of psycholinguistic questions

Abstract

Coarticulation in adult speech spans multiple segments, including across syllable and word boundaries. Little in the way of comparable data is available for child speech, where the focus has been on within-syllable anticipatory effects. Still, the developmental studies indicate that anticipatory coarticulation within a syllable is as strong in child speech as in adult speech, and perhaps stronger. This finding is consistent with the hypothesis that words are fundamental units of production under the long-held assumption that anticipatory coarticulation reflects speech motor planning. Our current work leverages this same assumption to investigate age-related changes in the structure of the speech plan. A related goal is to characterize the development of long-distance anticipatory coarticulation. For example, we are testing the hypothesis that younger children’s plan consists of more fully individuated word-sized production units than the plan guiding older children’s and adults’ speech in sentence elicitation experiments, where the initial boundary of a production unit is operationalized as the onset of lip rounding. The work has propelled us to develop a novel psycholinguistic measure of coarticulation, and is now leading us to question the concept of a speech plan and the nature of anticipatory coarticulation. [Work supported by NIH award number R01HD087452.]