Effect of Temporal Variations on Phoneme Identification Skills in Children and Adults A Comparative Study.

Abstract

The present study investigated the ability of 2-3 year old Kannada speaking children, and adults to identify synthetic phonemes varying in voice onset time (VOT). Four picturable (two minimal pair) words with stop consonants contrasting in voicing (labial:/b/and/p/, velar:/g/and/k/) in word initial position in Kannada were selected. These words as uttered by a 21-year-old female native Kannada speaker were recorded and stored onto the computer memory. VOT was truncated and/b-p/, and/g-k/continuum were synthesized using Praat software which was audio recorded onto a CD. The edited tokens were presented to thirty 2-3 year old children and thirty adults (18 28 years) individually. Each group consisted of 15 males and 15 females. Children were instructed to point to the pictures placed before them as they listen to the tokens and the investigator noted their responses on a binary forced-choice scoring sheet.