The Effects of Gender and Elicitation Method on the Prosodic Cues Used by 7- to 11-year-old Children to Signal Sentence Type

• Main Author: Powell, Lacey Ann
• Format: Others
• Published: BYU ScholarsArchive 2011
• Subjects: children; development; elicitation; gender; prosody; suprasegmental; Communication Sciences and Disorders
• Online Access: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/2828; https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3827&context=etd

The purpose of this study was to examine the prosodic cues used by 7 to 11 year-old children to signal questions and declarative statements in terms of changes in fundamental frequency (F0), duration, and intensity. Additional aims were to evaluate how children's use of prosody changes as a function of gender and method of elicitation. A group of 16 children participated in three different types of elicitation tasks (imitative, reading, and naturalistic). An acoustic analysis revealed that the participants produced the different sentence types using a variety of acoustic cues. Not only do children vary the mean of F0 and intensity at the end of the sentences, but they also seemed to use relative differences in peak intensity and F0. Differences between sentence types were also found in the F0 and intensity slope in the terminal portion of sentences. In addition, the way in which the participants signaled sentence type changed as a function of speaker gender and elicitation method for a limited number of acoustic measures. Although the present study found acoustic differences in how the participants' produced the sentence types, additional research is needed to determine the perceptual impact of such differences.