Presenter(s): Quinn Mitchell
Faculty Mentor(s): Melissa Redford & Jill Potratz
Poster 116
Session: Social Sciences & Humanities
Lexical stress is determined by varying amounts of duration, intensity, and pitch. These aspects work together to convey if a word is iambic or trochaic. The purpose of this study was to compare two groups of 5-year-old children: (n=10) typically developing children and those with delayed articulation skills (n=5). Their performance on a lexical stress task was analyzed to determine how an articulation delay effects the suprasegmental aspects of production. The Diagnostic Evaluation of Articulation and Phonology (Dodd et al., 2012) was used to determine if the children were in the typically developing (TD) group or the delayed articulation skills (DA) group. The lexical stress task used in this study tests children’s ability to repeat randomized disyllabic non-word sounds that were either trochaic (/ˈbɑdɑ) or iambic (bɑˈdɑ/) and increased in repetition length as the task progressed. The children’s productions were judged and scored by 6 trained research assistants who determined that the DA group produced more errors than the TD group. Acoustic measures on duration, intensity, pitch (F0), and vowel quality (F1 and F2) of correctly produced vowels gave no indication as to why the DA group was performing more poorly. In some case’s the DA group made more correct trochees and iambs, yet they still have more errors than the TD group. Perhaps children with delayed articulation skills are putting focus on their articulators and do not have enough residual attention to give to their working memory to be able to recall the order of trochees and iambs.