The study more specifically investigated interactions between domains that have not yet been empirically connected: in particular phonological awareness, the awareness of the particulate nature of the language (e.g., Fowler, 1991 Studdert-Kennedy, 1998, 2005) that develops with literacy (reviews in Anthony and Francis, 2005 Brady et al., 2011 Goswami and Bryant, 2016 in German: Fricke et al., 2016) and anticipatory coarticulation, a mechanism that is deeply rooted in kinematics (e.g., Parush et al., 1983) and motor planning (e.g., Whalen, 1990 Levelt and Wheeldon, 1994 Grimme et al., 2011 Perrier, 2012 Davis and Redford, 2019) and is fundamental to speech fluency. In the present research, we adopted an integrated approach to the study of spoken language development considering parallel developments of the lexical, phonological, and speech motor systems. Despite a certain imbalance in the focus and analytical approaches of interaction studies, the findings suggest that spoken language proficiency entails dynamical interactions among a set of language-related domains including speech motor skill. Likewise, speech motor control studies have provided in-depth analyses of developmental changes in articulatory variability, or movement velocity during word or sentence production ( Smith and Goffman, 1998 Smith and Zelaznik, 2004 Green et al., 2010) without equivalently thorough assessments of children’s phonological or lexical knowledge allowing developmental interactions to be evaluated.
While relationships between lexical and phonological developments have been well documented over the last decades ( Storkel and Morrisette, 2002 Edwards et al., 2004, 2011 Stoel-Gammon, 2011 Vihman, 2017), research addressing their interaction with spoken language production has often been restricted to production accuracy or duration measures as metrics for assessing spoken language proficiency (e.g., Edwards et al., 2004 Munson et al., 2005). With the gradual expansion of children’s expressive repertoire comes the fine tuning of phonological knowledge (e.g., Ferguson and Farwell, 1975 Menn and Butterworth, 1983 Beckman and Edwards, 2000 Munson et al., 2012). In the first decade of life, most children learn to speak their native language effortlessly, without explicit instruction but with daily exposure and experiencing of their native language as a speech motor activity. Arguments for an integrated-interactive approach to skill development are discussed. Overall, results suggest that the process of developing spoken language fluency involves dynamical interactions between cognitive and speech motor domains. Similar findings were drawn between vocabulary and coarticulatory patterns. This interaction was mostly nonlinear: an increase in children’s phonological proficiency was not systematically associated with an equivalent change in coarticulation degree. Greater knowledge of sub-lexical units was associated with lower intra-syllabic coarticulation degree and greater differentiation of articulatory gestures for individual segments. Generalized additive modeling revealed strong interactions between children’s vocabulary and phonological awareness with coarticulatory patterns. Four behavioral tasks assessing various levels of phonological awareness from large to small units and expressive vocabulary were also administered. The technique of ultrasound imaging allowed for comparing the articulatory foundations of children’s coarticulatory patterns.
A speech production task was designed to test for developmental differences in intra-syllabic coarticulation degree in 41 German children from 4 to 7 years of age. The present study examined whether phonemic awareness correlates with coarticulation degree, commonly used as a metric for estimating the size of children’s production units.
However, the extent to which knowledge of phonemic units may interact with spoken language organization in (transparent) alphabetical languages has hardly been investigated. The development of phonological awareness, the knowledge of the structural combinatoriality of a language, has been widely investigated in relation to reading (dis)ability across languages.
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