Interactions between Lexical and Phrasal Prosody in School-aged Children's Speech

This study investigated how children deploy cues to prominence in a speech task designed to encourage lexical stress shift. The duration, amplitude and F0 of the rhymes in stress-shiftable words were compared in stress clash and non-clash contexts. In adults’ speech, lexical and phrasal prominence patterns reinforced each other and were not sensitive to context. In children’s speech, the prominence patterns were independent of one another, and the lexical patterns were sensitive to context. A year later, the same children showed more adult-like prominence patterns. The results are interpreted to suggest more sequentially organized and context-dependent prosodic units in children’s speech as compared to hierarchically structured prosodic phrases in adults’ speech.