[s] spectra in the speech of normally-articulating preschool children and adults
Gary G. Weismer, Mary F. Elbert, Janet D. Whiteside · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1980
[s] spectra from the speech of seven normally articulating pre-school children, and seven normally articulating young adults have been obtained from utterances recorded under highly controlled conditions [see Weisruer and Elbert, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 67, S39 (1980)]. Spectral analysis is accomplished in the frequency range 0–10 kHz by sampling the middle 50 ms of [s] waveforms with a fixed-bandwidth, real-time analyzer (Spectral Dynamics SD 335). Several different types of analysis reveal the following: 1) Peak energy locations are fairly stable within adult subjects, but relatively unstable within child subjects, and 2) spectral shape for child and adult subjects tend to be dissimilar. These results are taken to be additional confirmation that children control their speech mechanisms less efficiently than adults, and may suggest that children have [s] source characteristics (that is, articulatory constriction shapes) which differ from the corresponding adult characteristics in systematic ways. [Work supported by NINCDS Award No. PHS R01 15551-01.]