On the development of gestural organization: A cross-sectional study of vowel-to-vowel anticipatory coarticulation

In the first years of life, children differ greatly from adults in the temporal organization of their speech gestures in fluent language production. However, dissent remains as to the maturational direction of such organization. The present study sheds new light on this process by tracking the development of anticipatory vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in a cross-sectional investigation of 62 German children (from 3.5 to 7 years of age) and 13 adults. It focuses on gestures of the tongue, a complex organ whose spatiotemporal control is indispensable for speech production. The goal of the study was threefold: 1) investigate whether children as well as adults initiate the articulation for a target vowel in advance of its acoustic onset, 2) test if the identity of the intervocalic consonant matters and finally, 3) describe age-related developments of these lingual coarticulatory patterns. To achieve this goal, ultrasound tongue imaging was used to record lingual movements and quantify changes in coarticulation degree as a function of consonantal context and age. Results from linear mixed effects models indicate that like adults, children initiate vowels’ lingual gestures well ahead of their acoustic onset. Second, while the identity of the intervocalic consonant affects the degree of vocalic anticipation in adults, it does not in children at any age. Finally, the degree of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation is significantly higher in all cohorts of children than in adults. However, among children, a developmental decrease of vocalic coarticulation is only found for sequences including the alveolar stop /d/ which requires finer spatiotemporal coordination of the tongue’s subparts compared to labial and velar stops. Altogether, results suggest greater gestural overlap in child than in adult speech and support the view of a non-uniform and protracted maturation of lingual coarticulation calling for thorough considerations of the articulatory intricacies from which subtle developmental differences may originate.