Compensatory Strategies in the Developmental Patterns of English /s/: Gender and Vowel Context Effects.

Purpose: The developmental trajectory of English /s/ was investigated to determine the extent to which children's speech productions are acoustically fine-grained. Given the hypothesis that young children have adultlike phonetic knowledge of /s/, the following were examined: (a) whether this knowledge manifests itself in acoustic spectra that match the gender-specific patterns of adults, (b) whether vowel context affects the spectra of /s/ in adults and children similarly, and (c) whether children adopt compensatory production strategies to match adult acoustic targets.

Method: Several acoustic variables were measured from word-initial /s/ (and /t/) and the following vowel in the productions of children aged 2 to 5 years and adult controls using 2 sets of corpora from the Paidologos database.

Results: Gender-specific patterns in the spectral distribution of /s/ were found. Acoustically, more canonical /s/ was produced before vowels with higher F1 (i.e., lower vowels) in children, a context where lingual articulation is challenging. Measures of breathiness and vowel intrinsic F0 provide evidence that children use a compensatory aerodynamic mechanism to achieve their acoustic targets in articulatorily challenging contexts.

Conclusion: Together, these results provide evidence that children's phonetic knowledge is acoustically detailed and gender specified and that speech production goals are acoustically oriented at early stages of speech development.