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Phonetic reduction in spontaneous speech by children aged 9-14 years

Tuomainen, O; Lee, C; Granlund, S; Hazan, VL; (2015) Phonetic reduction in spontaneous speech by children aged 9-14 years. Presented at: 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Glasgow, UK. Green open access

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Abstract

The aim of our study was to investigate whether children distinguish between ‘new’ and ‘given’ information via phonetic reduction in spontaneous speech in a similar way to adults. An interactive ‘spot the difference’ game was used to elicit spontaneous speech. Word duration, fundamental frequency and vowel formant frequencies in repeated content words relative to when they were mentioned for the first time were analysed in 96 children between 9-14 years of age. There were significant developmental changes in the three acoustic-phonetic parameters between children and adults. Children produced longer words, had higher median pitch and vowel formant values than adults. However, despite these differences in spontaneous speech between children and adults, we report that, by 9 years of age (and possibly earlier), children produce phonetic reduction to higlight 'new/given' information distinction in spontaneous speech dialogues in an adult-like manner.

Type: Conference item (UNSPECIFIED)
Title: Phonetic reduction in spontaneous speech by children aged 9-14 years
Event: 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences
Location: Glasgow, UK
Dates: 10 August 2015 - 14 August 2015
ISBN-13: 978-0-85261-941-4
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
Publisher version: https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/i...
Language: English
Additional information: This work is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivativeWorks 3.0 license. You are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the work), but you must attribute the author, you may not use this work for commercial purposes and you may not alter, transform, or build upon this work and distribute any derivative works you create under a similar license.
Keywords: Spontaneous speech, speaker adaptation, second-mention reduction, child speech production
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > UCL GOS Institute of Child Health
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1470560
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