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Speech, songs, and intermediate vocalizations : a longitudinal study of preschool children’s vocal development

University of British Columbia

The present study is a qualitative and quantitative interdisciplinary investigation of young children's vocal development. It investigated how vocalizations of young children mutate in relation to the children's linguistic and musical development, and the contexts in which these developments take place. Eight girls age eighteen to thirty-eight months participated in this study. Four spoke Chinese and four spoke English as their first language. Each child was visited every four to six months over a 42 month period. Acoustic analyses were performed on recorded vocal responses, and three judges classified the vocalizations and provided perceptual evaluation. It appears that young children have established communicative pitches that are associated with different forms of vocalizations by age two. All children consistently sang with higher fundamental frequencies than they used for speaking, while other forms of vocalization appear to be positioned consistently between singing and speaking. Both the mean fundamental frequency data and the qualitative data suggest some possible differences in vocal pitch behaviours across language. Chinese bilingual children made comparatively less but stable distinction between their speech and song; in their acoustic intermediate vocalizations however, the boundary between speech and song was "fuzzy". English monolingual children made increasingly clearer and wider acoustical distinctions between their speech and songs; their contextual intermediate vocalizations were made up of intermittent singing and speaking. The intermediate vocalizations observed in the present study appear to confirm that singing and speaking are two vocal phenomena that exist along a continuum. They call into question the entire concept of differences between singing and speaking both acoustically and contextually. These intermediate vocalizations offer a rich account of the linguistic and musical development of a child; they suggest that while first spoken language appears to affect vocal development, a child's non-speech auditory environment is also crucial to the understanding of her vocal behaviours.

Thesis/Dissertation

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2009-07-02

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/10017

Curriculum Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

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