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Purpose: As a class, fricatives are more "resistant" to consonant-vowel coarticulation than other English sounds. This study investigates the relative coarticulatory resistance of /[voiceless dental fricative], s, [voiceless palato-alveolar fricative]/ in child and adult speech to better understand the acquisition of individuated speech sounds. Method: Ten 5-year-old children, seven 8-year-old children, and nine college-age adults produced [[schwa]FV] sequences in carrier phrases, where F was /[voiceless dental fricative]/, /s/, or /[voiceless palato-alveolar fricative]/ and V was /ae/, /i/, or /u/. In Experiment 1, coarticulation was perceptually indexed: 65 adults predicted the target stressed vowel based on forward-gated audiovisual speech samples for a subset of four speakers from each age group. In Experiment 2, dynamic spectral measures of the /[schwa]FV/ sequences were analyzed using smoothing spline analysis of variance to again test for vowel effects on fricative articulation across age groups. Results: The perceptual results indicated that fricatives blocked vowel-vowel coarticulation across speaker age groups. Contrary to expectation, vowels were most accurately predicted when F was /s/ and not when it was /[voiceless palato-alveolar fricative]/ or /[voiceless dental fricative]/ across age groups. Acoustic results indicated the expected biomechanically motivated /[voiceless palato-alveolar fricative]/ > /s/ > /[voiceless dental fricative]/ coarticulatory resistance hierarchy in adults' speech. By contrast, /[voiceless palato-alveolar fricative]/ > /s/ were similarly influenced by context in 8-year-olds' speech, and the results from 5-year-olds' speech suggested an influence of order of acquisition in that /[voiceless dental fricative]/ was surprisingly resistant to coarticulation. Conclusion: The study results are taken to suggest that a temporal constraint on fricative articulation interacts with biomechanical constraints during development to influence patterns of coarticulation in school-age children's speech.

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 /[voiced alveolar approximant]/ 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/, /[voiced alveolar approximant]/, or /d/ (control) as singleton onsets and /ae/ 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 /[schwa]#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 /[voiced alveolar approximant]/ along F3. Adults distinguished /l/ from /[voiced alveolar approximant]/ 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 /[voiced alveolar approximant]/ along F2, but both liquids were distinguished from /d/ in the domains investigated. Experiment 2 results indicated that /[voiced alveolar approximant]/ 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 /[schwa]#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 /[voiced alveolar approximant]/ in running speech.

The article reports that Hul'q'umi'num' (Central Salish) is spoken along the Salish sea on the southeastern side of Vancouver Island and the adjacent Gulf Islands in British Columbia (BC), Canada. Topics include examines that Hul'q'umi'num' has fewer than forty L1 speakers but increasing numbers of L2 speakers of all ages, with the language revitalization movement rapidly gaining momentum across Hul'q'umi'num' territory.

Lower Sorbian is a moribund language spoken in Eastern Germany that features a three-way sibilant contrast, /s, ʂ, ɕ/. The vast majority of L1 speakers are above eighty years of age and virtually no young Sorbians learn Lower Sorbian as their first language. There are language revitalization programs in place, but this means that virtually all Lower Sorbian speakers are L2 learners whose first language is German. German, as opposed to Lower Sorbian, has a two-way sibilant contrast, /s, ʃ/. So, Lower Sorbian learners need to acquire a perceptually similar sibilant contrast, /ʂ, ɕ/, that commonly assimilates with a single L1 segment, /ʃ/. The two-to-one assimilation makes acquisition difficult. In this project, I examine the acquisition of the three-way sibilant contrast using ultrasound technology. The ultrasound data revealed that learners in the contemporary context do not produce a distinction between /ʂ, ɕ/ and only learners at an advanced level who had significant exposure to L1 speakers have acquired a three-way sibilant distinction. The findings are put into the context of models of L2 acquisition and generalized implications for foreign language acquisition are discussed., Competing Interests: No competing interests were disclosed., (Copyright: © 2024 Howson PJ.)

Although liquids are mastered late, English-speaking children are said to have fully acquired these segments by age 8. The aim of this study was to test whether liquid coarticulation was also adult-like by this age. 8-year-old productions of /əLa/ and /əLu/ sequences were compared to 5-year-old and adult productions of these sequences. SSANOVA analyses of formant frequency trajectories indicated that, while adults contrasted rhotics and laterals from the onset of the vocalic sequence, F2 trajectories for rhotics and lateral were overlapped at the onset of the /əLa/ sequence in 8-year-old productions and across the entire /əLu/ sequence. The F2 trajectories for rhotics and laterals were even more overlapped in 5-year olds' productions. Overall, the study suggests that whereas younger children have difficulty coordinating the tongue body/root gesture with the tongue tip gesture, older children still struggle with the intergestural timing associated with liquid production.