Perception-production relations in later development of American English rhotics

Tara McAllister Byun, Mark Tiede, Tara McAllister Byun, Mark Tiede

Abstract

It is known that some adult listeners have more sharply defined perceptual categories than others, and listeners with more precise auditory targets are also more precise in their production of contrasts. There is additionally evidence that children who have not yet mastered production of a contrast show diminished performance on perceptual measures of the same contrast. To date, however, few studies have investigated developmental perception-production relations using the fine-grained measures typical of adult studies. Existing evidence suggests that perception and production can be closely connected in development, but this relationship may break down as perception and articulation mature at different rates. This study evaluated perception and production of the English /r-w/ contrast in 40 typically-developing children aged 9-14. Perceptual sensitivity was measured with a logistic function fitted over responses in a forced-choice identification task using two synthetic 10-step continua from rake to wake. Participants also produced rhotic and non-rhotic words. Across participants, there was a significant correlation between perceptual acuity and rhoticity in production, although this effect was only observed for one of two continua tested. These results provide preliminary evidence compatible with the hypothesis that children with a more refined auditory target for a sound also produce that sound more accurately.

Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1. Distributions of acoustic values (F3-F2…
Fig 1. Distributions of acoustic values (F3-F2 distance) measured across up to 20 repetitions of each word (bird, raid) for each speaker.
Speakers are subdivided by gender and rank-ordered by age. Productions are pooled across careful and casual speech conditions.
Fig 2. Distributions of acoustic values (F3-F2…
Fig 2. Distributions of acoustic values (F3-F2 distance) measured across up to 20 productions in each speech condition (careful, casual) for each speaker.
Speakers are subdivided by gender and rank-ordered by age. Productions are pooled across the target words bird and raid.
Fig 3. Sample response data and best-fit…
Fig 3. Sample response data and best-fit logistic functions (female speaker continuum).
Left panel represents an 11;0-year-old female with a boundary location of 6.14 and a boundary width of 1.95. Right panel represents a 10;6-year-old female with a boundary location of 5.0 and a boundary width of 0.0.
Fig 4. Boxplots of boundary width and…
Fig 4. Boxplots of boundary width and location values for both male and female speaker continua.
Left panel represents child listeners in the lab setting. Right panel represents adult listeners recruited online.
Fig 5. Scatterplots representing boundary width versus…
Fig 5. Scatterplots representing boundary width versus F3-F2 distance, partitioned by word.
Shaded band represents a 95% confidence interval around the best-fit line.
Fig 6. Responses to female and male…
Fig 6. Responses to female and male speaker continua from adults recruited online: Percentage of trials classified as rake for each stimulus, pooled across raters.
Fig 7. Responses to female and male…
Fig 7. Responses to female and male speaker continua from adults recruited online: Distribution of clicks on a visual analog scale for each token, where 0.0 = “the w sound” and 1.0 = “the r sound”.

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