Further Results on the Development of Voicing in Stop Consonants in Young Children

This paper reports further results on a research project that was designed to examine the development of stop consonants occurring in initial position in the vocalizations of children primarily during the second year of life. A previous paper [M. Preston, G. Yeni‐Komshian, R. Stark, and D. Port, “Certain Aspects of the Development of Speech Production and Perception in Children,” J. Acoust. Soc. Amer. 46, 102 (A) (1969)] presented results for apical stops. This report deals with the results for labial and velar stops over the same time period. The principal measure employed in the analysis is voice onset time (VOT), a perceptually and productively relevant measure, which can be easily obtained from spectrograms. In addition, a more complete analysis of apical stops comparing VOT distributions of adults with children between 2 and 212 yr is presented. [Research supported in part by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.]