The Acquisition of Articulatory Timing for Liquids: Evidence From Child and Adult Speech

Abstract

Purpose Liquids are among the last sounds to be acquired by English-speaking children. The current study considers their acquisition from an articulatory timing perspective by investigating anticipatory posturing for /l/ versus /ɹ/ in child and adult speech. Method In Experiment 1, twelve 5-year-old, twelve 8-year-old, and 11 college-aged speakers produced carrier phrases with penultimate stress on monosyllabic words that had /l/, /ɹ/, or /d/ (control) as singleton onsets and /æ/ or /u/ as the vowel. Short-domain anticipatory effects were acoustically investigated based on schwa formant values extracted from the preceding determiner (= the ) and dynamic formant values across the /ə#LV/ sequence. In Experiment 2, long-domain effects were perceptually indexed using a previously validated forward-gated audiovisual speech prediction task. Results Experiment 1 results indicated that all speakers distinguished /l/ from /ɹ/ along F3. Adults distinguished /l/ from /ɹ/ with a lower F2. Older children produced subtler versions of the adult pattern; their anticipatory posturing was also more influenced by the following vowel. Younger children did not distinguish /l/ from /ɹ/ along F2, but both liquids were distinguished from /d/ in the domains investigated. Experiment 2 results indicated that /ɹ/ was identified earlier than /l/ in gated adult speech; both liquids were identified equally early in 5-year-olds' speech. Conclusions The results are interpreted to suggest a pattern of early tongue–body retraction for liquids in /ə#LV/ sequences in children's speech. More generally, it is suggested that children must learn to inhibit the influence of vowels on liquid articulation to achieve an adultlike contrast between /l/ and /ɹ/ in running speech.