Articulatory and acoustic characteristics of English /l/ in children’s speech production
Bibliographic record
Abstract
English /l/ is one of the later-developing sounds in language acquisition. It has syllable-based allophones (e.g., light l in initial, dark l in final) and comprises multiple articulatory gestures (e.g., tongue tip fronting and raising, tongue dorsum backing, lateral dipping) with different coordination in timing and magnitude in syllable position (e.g., synchronicity in initial, tongue tip delay in final with greater reduction in magnitude). Using ultrasound, this study examined how articulatory characteristics of /l/ are presented in children’s speech production. Replicating previous articulatory studies in adult speech production, /l/ words in isolation and combination were collected from eight monolingual children aged 3;11 to 5;9. Although some children produced more similar to adult /l/, children produced /l/ using different articulatory properties. /l/ was produced with less detail and more variations than in the adults’ speech as movements of the tongue were simplified or modified. While articulatory performance varied across subjects as well as syllable positions, acoustic analysis of formants (F1, F2, F3) of sample tokens showed similar patterns for all subjects. This study suggests that the tendency toward late acquisition of /l/ is due directly to the articulatory as well as motor complexity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".