Coarticulation in Children

Together with Aude Noiray, I conducted work on coarticulatory changes across childhood. This was done in close collaboration with the University of Potsdam’s BabyLAB. Coarticulation refers to the overlap of articulatory gestures enabling fluent speech production. For example, although both words “bee” and “boat” start with the same sound (/b/), the tongue body already anticipates the vowel from the start of the word - during /b/, it is positioned in the front of the mouth when we say “bee”, because this is necessary for /i/, but bunched in the back of the mouth when we say “boat”. While we perceive the /b/ in “bee” to be exactly the same as the /b/ in “boat”, the configurations of our articulators, therefore, differ.

While coarticulation has been well studied in adults, its amount and extent, as well as changes across childhood were underinvestigated. We believe that to describe human speech production, our models need to be able to account for the developing system in childhood. Hence, we built an innovative recording and analysis platform allowing us to acquire ultrasound tongue imaging data from children as young as three years of age. In three- to seven-year-olds and in adults, we investigated anticipatory vowel-to-consonant and vowel-to-vowel coarticulation, the temporal unfolding of the vocalic gesture in the anticipatory as well as the carryover direction, and adressed linguistic and cognitive skills potentially interacting with the coarticulatory changes we found.

Currently, we are addressing coarticulatory extent in read aloud versus repeated speech to inform models of reading development about changes in seriality and phoneme decoding efficiency. A publication is in preparation.

Those studies I was primarily responsible for, are also published, summarized, and put in a broader context in my openly accessible doctoral thesis.

Descriptions of our projects targeted at the families registered in the BabyLAB can be found here (in German): Coarticulation and Reading

This work was financially supported by the DFG (1098/2-1 & 255676067) and the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions ITN (641858) granted to Aude Noiray.