Lexical and Phrasal Prominence Patterns in School-Aged Children's Speech

This study investigated the integration of word- and phrase-level prominences in speech produced by 25 school-aged children (6;2 to 7;3) and 25 adults. Participants produced disyllabic number words in a straight count condition and in two phrasal conditions, namely, a stress clash and non-clash phrasal context. Duration and amplitude measures of syllable rhymes were used to assess the realization of lexical stress, and fundamental frequency (F0) measures were used to assess the realization of phrasal pitch accents across conditions. Results showed that the duration and F0 correlates varied independently of each other as a function of condition in child speech, but much less so in adult speech. The group differences were taken to indicate that 6-year-old children have yet to develop prosodic structures with integrated prominence. Structural and pragmatic interpretations of the results are discussed.