The influence of phonemic awareness development on acoustic cue weighting in children's speech perception
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Date
2003Author
Mayo, Catherine
Scobbie, James M
Hewlett, Nigel
Waters, Daphne
Metadata
Abstract
In speech perception, children give particular patterns of weight to different
acoustic cues (their cue weighting). These patterns appear to change with
increased linguistic experience. Previous speech perception research has found a
positive correlation between more analytical cue weighting strategies and the
ability to consciously think about and manipulate segment-sized units (phonemic
awareness). That research did not, however, aim to address whether the relation
is in any way causal or, if so, then in which direction possible causality might
move. Causality in this relation could move in 1 of 2 ways: Either phonemic
awareness development could impact on cue weighting strategies or changes in
cue weighting could allow for the later development of phonemic awareness. The
aim of this study was to follow the development of these 2 processes longitudinally
to determine which of the above 2 possibilities was more likely. Five-year-old
children were tested 3 times in 7 months on their cue weighting strategies for a
/so/–/So/ contrast, in which the 2 cues manipulated were the frequency of
fricative spectrum and the frequency of vowel-onset formant transitions. The
children were also tested at the same time on their phoneme segmentation and
phoneme blending skills. Results showed that phonemic awareness skills tended to
improve before cue weighting changed and that early phonemic awareness
ability predicted later cue weighting strategies. These results suggest that the
development of metaphonemic awareness may play some role in changes in cue
weighting.