Cues for interpreting early child speech
Karen L. Landahl · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1979
A word spoken in isolation often shows more precision in its production than that same word spoken in a longer utterance. Articulatory imprecision in speech probably occurs because speech interpretation involves contextual cues This situation suggests the following questions with regard to child speech: (1) Are the child's words phonetically stable whether produced in isolation or in a longer utterance? (2) To what extent do adults use context versus acoustic cues in listening to child speech? Data were derived by presenting a taped conversation with adults and an 86-week-old child to six subjects: the child's parents, two linguists, and two non-linguists. These subjects each heard four different versions of this material: the child's words only, excised by use of a computer editing system; the child's utterances only; the entire tape; and the entire tape with written notes of the non-linguistic context. Subjects were asked to identify forms which they considered to correspond to words in the adult language.