Durational cues to fricative codas in 2-year-olds%26apos; American English: Voicing and morphemic factors

作者：Song Jae Yung^*; Demuth Katherine; Evans Karen; Shattuck Hufnagel Stefanie

来源：Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2013, 133(5): 2931-2946.

DOI：10.1121/1.4795772

In the process of phonological development, fricatives are generally assumed to be later acquired than stops. However, most of the observational work on which this claim is based has concerned itself with word-initial onset consonants; little is known about how and when fricatives are mastered in word-final coda position (e.g., nose). This is all the more critical in a language like English, where word-final fricatives often carry important morphological information (e.g., toes, goes). This study examines the development of duration cues to the voicing feature contrast in coda fricatives, using longitudinal spontaneous speech data from CVC words (e.g., noise vs face) produced by three children (1; 6-2; 6 years) and six mothers. Results show that the children were remarkably adult-like in the use of duration cues to voicing contrasts in fricatives even in this early age range. Furthermore the children, like the mothers, had longer frication noise durations for morphemic compared to non-morphemic fricatives (e.g., toes vs nose) when these segments occurred in utterance-final position. These results suggest that although children%26apos;s fricatives tend to be overall longer and more voiced compared to those of adults, the voicing and morphological contrasts for fricative codas are acquired early in production.

• 出版日期2013-5