Dissertations and Theses @ UNI
Availability
Open Access Thesis
Keywords
Accents and accentuation; Articulation disorders in children--Diagnosis;
Abstract
The reliability of listeners' transcription of young children's syllable stress has not been the focus of any experimental study. Goffman (1985) reported poor reliability between listeners' judgments of syllable stress productions by two-year-old children. Two possible reasons for the poor reliability were hypothesized. First, the children may not have been consistently altering the acoustic parameters which signal stress (fundamental frequency, intensity, and duration). Second, listeners may have focused upon different acoustic parameters when making their judgments. The purpose of the present two-part study was to initiate the study of adult transcription of children's production of stress in words. Experiment I focused on the analysis of the acoustic properties of children's productions. Experiment II focused on listeners' judgments of these productions, with regard to interjudge reliability and to how the judgments correlated with the acoustic parameters altered. In Experiment I, six children each from three age groups (two, three, and four years) produced multiple tokens of eight contrived two-syllable words (balanced for stress placement and segmental content) during a play activity. Acoustic measurements of fundamental frequency, intensity, and duration were obtained for each syllable. In Experiment II, five adult judges listened to stimulus tapes which consisted of randomized presentations of each child's productions. The listeners were asked to judge stress placement in one of three categories (first syllable stressed, second syllable stressed, or both syllables equally stressed). Results of Experiment I showed that fundamental frequency and intensity were used by the three- and four-year-olds to mark stress, but were not used consistently by the two-year-olds. All age groups altered duration to mark syllable stress, but for the younger children its use was limited to the second syllable position. Results of Experiment II found that listeners were more reliable at judging stress placement in older children than in younger children. Results also showed that fundamental frequency and intensity were the acoustic parameters most highly correlated with listener judgments. These results confirmed that the younger children did not consistently alter all acoustic parameters. Major differences were observed between the two-year-olds and three-/four-year-olds in their use of the three acoustic features studied. Listeners appeared to rely more upon intensity and fundamental frequency cues than upon duration cues in making their judgments.
Year of Submission
1988
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Department
Department of Communicative Disorders
First Advisor
Karen E. Pollock
Second Advisor
Carlin Hageman
Third Advisor
Jack Yates
Date Original
1988
Object Description
1 PDF file (68 leaves)
Copyright
©1988 Diane Marie Brammer
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Brammer, Diane Marie, "The Production and Transcription of Syllabic Stress in Young Children" (1988). Dissertations and Theses @ UNI. 2173.
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/etd/2173
Comments
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