Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-r7xzm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-26T17:43:42.178Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Phonological reduction in maternal speech in northern Australian English: change over time*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 July 2013

HEATHER BUCHAN*
Affiliation:
Interdisciplinary Educational Research Institute (IERI) and Faculty of Education, University of Wollongong; NHMRC Centre for Research Excellence in Mental Health and Substance Use, National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, University of New South Wales
CAROLINE JONES
Affiliation:
Interdisciplinary Educational Research Institute (IERI) and Faculty of Education, University of Wollongong; The MARCS Institute, University of Western Sydney
*
Address for correspondence: Heather Buchan: e-mail h.buchan@unsw.edu.au

Abstract

Segmental variation in maternal speech to children changes over time. This study investigated variation in non-citation speech processes in a longitudinal, 26-hour corpus of maternal northern Australian English. Recordings were naturalistic parent–child interactions when children (N=4) were 1;6, 2;0, and 2;6. The mothers' speech was phonetically transcribed and analyzed. Based on previous sociophonetic research showing proportional changes in speech variants in maternal speech as children get older, it was predicted that deletion of word-initial /h/ and word-final /v/, processes common in non-citation speech, would increase over time. Instead results showed a non-linear change in deletion within a stable set of lexical items. Deletion proportionately increased between 1;6 and 2;0 and decreased between 2;0 and 2;6. Further analysis indicated increased deletion was not accounted for by changes in speech rate, which only marginally increased over time. Findings suggest mothers fine-tune differentially over time as children's receptive and productive language knowledge develops.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

The authors thank the audience at the 12th International Congress for the Study of Child Language (IASCL 2011) for their feedback on an early version of this paper. We also thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions. The authors thank the speakers and their families for participating in the study, and the childcare services in Katherine, NT, in particular Good Beginnings Australia and Little Mangoes childcare centre. The research was supported by Discovery Grant DP0985395 ‘Phonological development in child speakers of mixed language’ (2009–2012, C.I. Caroline Jones) from the Australian Research Council.

References

REFERENCES

Akhtar, N. (2005). The robustness of learning through overhearing. Developmental Science 8, 199209.Google Scholar
Au, T. K., Knightly, L. M., Jun, S. A. & Oh, S. (2002). Overhearing a language during childhood. American Psychological Society 13, 238–43.Google Scholar
Bard, E. G. & Anderson, A. (1983). The unintelligibility of speech to children. Journal of Child Language 10, 265–92.Google Scholar
Bernstein-Ratner, N. (1984a). Patterns of vowel modification in mother–child speech. Journal of Phonetics 11, 557–78.Google Scholar
Bernstein-Ratner, N. (1984b). Phonological rule usage in mother–child speech. Journal of Phonetics 12, 245–54.Google Scholar
Buchan, H. (2013). Phonetic variation in Gurindji Kriol and northern Australian English: a longitudinal study of fricatives in maternal speech. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Wollongong, Australia.Google Scholar
Chevrot, J. P., Dugua, C. & Fayol, M. (2009). Liaison acquisition, word segmentation and construction in French: a usage-based account. Journal of Child Language 36, 557–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chevrot, J. P., Nardy, A. & Barbu, S. (2011). Developmental dynamics of SES-related differences in children's production of obligatory and variable phonological alternations. Language Sciences 33, 180–91.Google Scholar
Cox, F. M. & Palethorpe, S. (2004). The border effect: vowel differences across the NSW/Victorian border. In Moskovsky, C. (ed.), Proceedings of Australian Linguistic Society Conference, 1–14. Newcastle, Australia: Australian Linguistics Society.Google Scholar
Cox, F. M. & Palethorpe, S. (2007). Illustrations of the IPA: Australian English. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 37, 341–50.Google Scholar
Cox, F. M. & Palethorpe, S. (2010). Broadness variation in Australian English speaking females. In Tabain, M., Fletcher, J., Grayden, D., Hajek, J. & Butcher, A. (eds.),Proceedings of the 12th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, 175–78. Melbourne: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association (ASSTA).Google Scholar
Cruttenden, A. (1994). Phonetic and prosodic aspects of baby talk. In Gallaway, C. & Richardson, B. J. (eds.), Input and interaction in language acquisition, 135–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Cutler, A. (1993). Phonological cues to open- and closed-class words in the processing of spoken sentences. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 22, 109–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fernald, A., Taeschner, T., Dunn, J., Papousek, M., de Boysson-Bardies, B. & Fukui, I. (1989). A cross-language study of prosodic modifications in mothers' and fathers' speech to preverbal infants. Journal of Child Language 16, 477501.Google Scholar
Foulkes, P. & Docherty, G. (2006). The social life of phonetics and phonology. Journal of Phonetics 34, 409–38.Google Scholar
Foulkes, P., Docherty, G. & Watt, D. (2005). Phonological variation in child-directed speech. Language 81, 177206.Google Scholar
Harrington, J., Cox, F. & Evans, Z. (1997). An acoustic phonetic study of broad, general, and cultivated Australian English vowels. Australian Journal of Linguistics 17, 155–84.Google Scholar
Horvath, B. M. (1985). Variation in Australian English: the sociolects of Sydney. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ingram, J. C. L. (1989). Connected speech processes in Australian English. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 9, 2149.Google Scholar
Jones, C., Meakins, F. & Buchan, H. (2011). Comparing vowels in Gurindji Kriol and Katherine English: citation speech data. Australian Journal of Linguistics 31, 305–26.Google Scholar
Jusczyk, P. W., Cutler, A. & Redanz, N. J. (1993). Infants' preference for the predominant stress patterns of English words. Child Development 64, 675–87.Google Scholar
Jusczyk, P. W., Friederici, A. D., Wessels, J. M. I., Svenkerud, V. Y. & Jusczyk, A. M. (1993). Infants' sensitivity to the sound patterns of native language words. Journal of Memory and Language 32, 402–20.Google Scholar
Jusczyk, P. W., Luce, P. A. & Charles-Luce, J. (1994). Infants' sensitivity to phonotactic patterns in the native language. Journal of Memory and Language 33, 630–45.Google Scholar
Kerswill, P. & Williams, A. (2000). Creating a New Town koine: children and language change in Milton Keynes. Language in Society 29, 65115.Google Scholar
Ko, E. S. (2012). Nonlinear development of speaking rate in child-directed speech. Lingua 122, 841–57.Google Scholar
Koreman, J. (2006). Perceived speech rate: the effects of articulation rate and speaking style in spontaneous speech. Journal of the Acoustic Society of America 119, 582–96.Google Scholar
Kuhl, P. K., Andruski, J. E., Chistovich, I. A., Chistovich, L. A., Kozhevnikova, E. V., Ryskina, , … & Lacerda, F. (1997). Cross-language analysis of phonetic units in language addressed to infants. Science 277, 684–86.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kuhl, P. K., Williams, K. A., Lacerda, F., Stevens, K. N. & Lindblom, B. (1992). Linguistic experience alters phonetic perception in infants by 6 months of age. Science 255, 606–08.Google Scholar
Labov, W. (1989). The child as a linguistic historian. Language Variation and Change 1, 8597.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, W. (2001). Principles of linguistic change. Volume 2: Social factors. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Lee, S. & Davis, B. (2010). Segmental distribution patterns of English infant- and adult-directed speech. Journal of Child Language 37, 767–91.Google Scholar
Lee, S., Davis, B. & MacNeilage, P. F. (2008). Segmental properties of input to infants: a study of Korean. Journal of Child Language 35, 591617.Google Scholar
Lindblom, B. (1990). Explaining phonetic variation: a sketch of the H&H theory. In Hardcastle, W. J. & Marchal, A. (eds.), Speech production and speech modelling, 403–39. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.Google Scholar
Liu, H. M., Tsao, F. M. & Kuhl, P. K. (2009). Age-related changes in acoustic modifications of Mandarin maternal speech to preverbal infants and five-year-old children: a longitudinal study. Journal of Child Language 36, 909–22.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES project: tools for analyzing talk, 3rd edn.Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Martinez-Sussmann, C., Akhtar, N., Diesendruck, G. & Markson, L. (2011). Orienting to third-party conversations. Journal of Child Language 38, 273–96.Google Scholar
Meakins, F. (2011). Case marking in contact: the development and function of case morphology in Gurindji Kriol. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Mitchell, A. G. & Delbridge, A. (1965). The pronunciation of English in Australia. Sydney: Angus & Robertson.Google Scholar
Monaghan, P., Chater, N. & Christiansen, M. H. (2005). The differential role of phonological and distributional cues in grammatical categorisation. Cognition 96, 143–82.Google Scholar
Munson, B., Edwards, J. & Beckman, M. E. (2011). Phonological representations in language acquisition: climbing the ladder of abstraction. In Cohn, A. C., Fougeron, C. & Huffman, M. K. (eds.), Handbook of laboratory phonology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Pierrehumbert, J. B. (2003). Phonetic diversity, statistical learning, and acquisition of phonology. Language and Speech 46, 115–54.Google Scholar
Roberts, J. (1997). Acquisition of variable rules: a study of (-t,d) deletion in preschool children. Journal of Child Language 24, 351–72.Google Scholar
Rose, Y., Hedlund, G. J., Byrne, R., Wareham, T. & MacWhinney, B. (2007). Phon 1·2: a computational basis for phonological database elaboration and model testing. In Buttery, P., Villavicencio, A. & Korhonen, A. (eds.), Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Acquisition, 1724. Stroudsburg, PA: ACL. For recent developments see <http://phon.ling.mun.ca/phontrac/wiki/>.Google Scholar
Shi, R., Werker, J. F. & Cutler, A. (2006). Recognition and representation of function words in English-learning infants. Infancy 10, 187–98.Google Scholar
Shockey, L. & Bond, Z. S. (1980). Phonological processes in speech addressed to children. Phonetica 37, 267–74.Google Scholar
Smith, J., Durham, M. & Fortune, L. (2007). ‘Mam, my trousers is fa'in doon!’: community, caregiver and child acquisition of variation in a Scottish dialect. Language Variation and Change 19, 6399.Google Scholar
Smith, J., Durham, M. & Fortune, L. (2009). Universal and dialect-specific pathways of acquisition: caregivers, children and t/d deletion. Language Variation and Change 21, 6995.Google Scholar
Snow, C. E. (1977). Mothers' speech research: from input to interaction. In Snow, C. E. & Ferguson, C. (eds.), Talking to children: language input and acquisition, 3151. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Soderstrom, M. (2007). Beyond babytalk: re-evaluating the nature and content of speech input to preverbal infants. Developmental Review 27, 501–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stern, D. N., Spieker, S. & Barnett, R. K. (1983). The prosody of maternal speech: infant age and context related changes. Journal of Child Language 10, 115.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, S. A. & Temple, R. (2005). New perspectives on an ol' variable: (t,d) in British English. Language Variation and Change 17, 281302.Google Scholar
Tollfree, L. F. (1999). South-east London English: discrete versus continuous modelling of consonantal reduction. In Foulkes, P. & Docherty, G. J. (eds.), Urban Voices, 163–84. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Tollfree, L. F. (2001). Variation and change in Australian English consonants. In Blair, D. & Collins, P. (eds.), Varieties of English around the world: English in Australia, 4567. Amsterdam: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Wells, J. C. (1982). Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Williams, A. & Kerswill, P. (1999). Dialect levelling: continuity vs. change in Milton Keynes, Reading and Hull. In Foulkes, P. & Docherty, G. J. (eds.), Urban Voices, 141–62. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Youssef, V. (1991). Variation as a feature of language acquisition in the Trinidad context. Language in Society 22, 257–74.Google Scholar