Speech Production Development in Mandarin-Speaking Children: A Case of Lingual Stop Consonants
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Lingual stops are among the earliest sounds acquired by young children, but the process of acquiring the temporal coordination of lingual gestures necessary for the production of stop consonants appears to be protracted. The current research aims to investigate the developmental process of lingual stop consonants in 100 Mandarin-speaking 2- to 5-year-olds using the acoustic parameter voice onset time (VOT). Children were engaged in a word-repetition task and recorded while producing words that begin with /t/, /d/, /k/, and /g/. Results indicate well-established contrasts between /t/ and /d/ as well as between /k/ and /g/ by age 2. However, comparing with adults' speech patterns, children's speech productions are characterized by greater within-category dispersion and overlap, as well as smaller phoneme discriminability. Mandarin-speaking children also go through an "overshoot" stage by producing longer-than-adult VOT values, especially for voiceless aspirated stops /t/ and /k/. Lastly, unlike adults who exhibit gender-specific patterns in VOT, boys and girls do not show distinct patterns in their VOT by age 5. These results will be discussed in relation to children's lingual motor control development and the organization of phonological and phonetic structures during the process of language acquisition.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".