Exploring variation in accuracy and contrast for sibilant fricatives at the onset of fricative acquisition

Abstract

Children's speech differs from adult speech in the many ways, including in its phonetic characteristics. A central question for researchers interested in child speech sound acquisition is when and how a child acquires robust adult-like contrasts. In this thesis, I present a protocol for the analysis of the English sibilant fricatives "s" and "sh". Sibilant fricatives are of interest because they are late-acquired sounds that require articulatory-aerodynamic coordination, and are contrastively necessary in multiple languages around the world, English especially. Given the turbulent nature of the sound spectrum of fricative consonants, few agreed upon measures exist. Holliday, Reidy, Beckman and Edwards (In Preparation) propose that peak equivalent rectangular bandwidth is a psychoacoustically appropriate measure for modeling the robustness of phonological contrast between sibilant fricative types. The robustness measures put forth by Holliday et al. are applied to data from the speech of toddlers aged 28-39 months and are discussed.