GLOSS and the Department of Linguistics Colloquium
Friday, March 6th @3pm
107 Esslinger Hall
.
Danielle Barth
University of Oregon
Reduction in Adult, Child and Child-Directed Speech
This talk presents work on the production of homophonous verbs and auxiliaries in inter-adult
speech, child-directed speech and child speech. Using data drawn from a larger project on the
development of prosody in school-aged children by Melissa A. Redford (work supported by
NIH, Award Number R01HD061458) and from the Buckeye Corpus (Pitt et al., 2007), I examine
word reduction strategies in the speech of children and adults.
The caregivers from the present study are speaking to school-aged children (5-10 years old)
therefore lack many features of traditional child-directed speech. Despite this, caregivers use
more simplified semantic content (as measured by text entropy) and relatively longer function
words with younger children than older children. Younger children use more simplified semantic
content, have relatively longer function words, and much slower speech rate (Redford, 2014)
than older children. All adults and children shorten their function words in predictable contexts
and lengthen them in the presence of following disfluencies. In adult speech, function words also
received less intonational prominence (as measured by fundamental frequency).
However, children put greater intonational prominence on some function words, even while
shortening their durations. Adults shortened vowels to shorten whole words, but children’s vowel
durations did not correspond to their word durations. Adults had one of two main reduction
strategies: they either contracted function words often or they shortened function words greatly.
Older children also followed this pattern to some degree, but younger children (under 7 years
old) either both reduced word length and contracted words often or did neither. Taken together,
this research indicates that although children have the tools for word reduction, they do not use
these strategies fully in concert with each other, even at a relatively late age.