Segmental timing of young children and adults

Young children's speech is compared to adult-to-adult speech and adult-to-child speech by measuring durations and variability of each segment in CVC words. The results demonstrate that child speech exhibits an inconsistent timing relationship between consonants and vowels within a word. In contrast, consonant and vowel durations in adult-to-adult speech and adult-to-child speech exhibit significant relationships across segments, despite variability of segments when speaking rate is decreased. The results suggest that temporal patterns of young children are quite different from those of adults, and provide some evidence for lack of motor control capability and great variance in articulatory coordination.