Phonetics and Speech Sciences (말소리와 음성과학)

Korean Society of Speech Sciences (한국음성학회)
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Executive function and Korean children's stop production

  • Eun Jong Kong (School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Korea Aerospace University) ;
  • Hyunjung Lee (Department of English Language Education, Incheon National University) ;
  • Jeffrey J. Holliday (Department of Linguistics, University of Kansas)
  • Received : 2023.08.20
  • Accepted : 2023.09.11
  • Published : 2023.09.30
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Abstract

Previous studies have established a role for cognitive differences in explaining variability in speech processing across individuals. In the case of perceptual cue weighting in the context of a sound change, studies have produced conflicting results regarding the relationship between executive function and the use of redundant cues. The current study aimed to explore this relationship in acoustic cue weighting during speech production. Forty-one Korean-speaking children read a list of stop-initial words and completed two tests that assess executive function, i.e., Dimensional Change Card Sorting (DCCS) and digit n-back. Voice onset time (VOT) and fundamental frequency (F0) were measured in each word, and analyses were carried out to determine the extent to which children's executive function predicted their use of both informative and less informative cues to the three pairs comprising the Korean three-way stop laryngeal contrast. No evidence was found for a relationship between cognitive ability and acoustic cue weighting in production, which is at odds with previous, albeit conflicting, results for speech perception. While this result may be due to the lack of task demands in the production task used here, it nevertheless expands the empirical ground upon which future work in this area may proceed.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

The current study explored a subset of participants from the larger speech production database presented in Holliday et al. (2023). We report original data on executive function task scores and statistical analyses examining their relationship with speech production.

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