On the perceived quantity of young children's speech segments
Citation
Nakai, S. & Kunnari, S. (2014). On the perceived quantity of young children's speech
segments. In Celata, C. & Costamagna, L. (Eds.), Consonant gemination in first and
second language acquisition (pp. 119–144). Pisa: Pacini Editore.
Abstract
This chapter considers why young children's speech segments are often
perceived by adults as geminates in light of two studies on the perception of
phonological quantity in Finnish and Japanese. Study 1 used stimulus continua
created from a nonword keke, which orthogonally varied in the word-medial stop's
absolute (raw) duration and its durational ratios to the neighbouring vowels. For both
Finnish and Japanese, the adults' perception of phonological quantity of the wordmedial
stop was jointly affected by the two manipulated factors: the longer its
absolute duration, the more likely the word-medial stop was perceived as a geminate,
for any given set of durational ratios between the stop and the neighbouring vowels.
Study 2 found the same effects in the native-speaker adults' perception of Finnish and
Japanese children's early words: the adults often judged the word-medial stop in the
children's attempts at disyllabic words as a geminate if the word-medial stop had a
long absolute duration, even if its duration relative to neighbouring vowels was short.
We suggest that young children's slow articulation rate makes their speech segments
prone to be perceived as geminates by the adults.