The production of Greek voiceless fricatives by young children
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2021/12/0042/000515Keywords:
children, Greek, voiceless fricatives, duration, spectral mean, varianceAbstract
The present study aims to identify age-related developmental patterns for the Greek language, by analyzing children’s and adults’ fricative productions. Frication duration, as well as first and second spectral moments (mean, variance), were measured in the first stressed syllable of real disyllabic words produced by young children and adult female speakers. A significant effect of age was revealed for fricative duration, with children presenting significantly higher values than adults for all fricatives. The effect of age was also significant for the first and second spectral moments, but not for all fricatives, while the effects of place of articulation and post-fricative vowel on the examined parameters suggest similar intra-category differences for the different age groups.
References
Bernthal, J. E., Bankson, N. W., & Flipsen, P. (2018). Φωνολογικές και Αρθρωτικές Διαταραχές. Edited by H. Papathanasiou. Athens: Konstantaras Publications.
Boersma, P., & Weenink, D. (2019). Praat: Doing Phonetics by Computer [Computer program], Version 6.0.50.
Jongman, A., Wayland, R., & Wong, S. (2000). Acoustic characteristics of English fricatives. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 108(3), 1252-1263.
Li, F. (2012). Language-specific developmental differences in speech production: A cross-language acoustic study. Child Development, 83(4), 1303-1315.
Nirgianaki, E. (2014). Acoustic characteristics of Greek fricatives. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 135(5), 2964-2976.
Nissen, S. L., & Fox, R. A. (2005). Acoustic and spectral characteristics of young children’s fricative productions: A developmental perspective. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 118(4), 2570-2578.
Nittrouer, S. (1995). Children learn separate aspects of speech production at different rates: Evidence from spectral moments. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 97(1), 520-530.
Syrika, A., Nicolaidis, K., Edwards, J., & Beckman, M. E. (2011). Acquisition of initial /s/-stop and stop-/s/ sequences in Greek. Language and Speech, 54(3), 361-386.
Vorperian, H. K., & Kent, R. D. (2008). Vowel acoustic space development in children: A synthesis of acoustic and anatomic data. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 50(6), 1510-1545.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.