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. 2021 Feb 20;8(2):159.
doi: 10.3390/children8020159.

A First Step toward the Clinical Application of Landmark-Based Acoustic Analysis in Child Mandarin

Chin-Ting Liu  1
Affiliations

A First Step toward the Clinical Application of Landmark-Based Acoustic Analysis in Child Mandarin

Chin-Ting Liu. Children (Basel). .

Abstract

As an initial step for the clinical application of landmark-based acoustic analysis in child Mandarin, the study quantified the developmental trajectories of consonants produced by four-to-seven-year-old children who acquired Taiwanese Mandarin as their first language. The results from a total of 80 children (20 in each age group, with gender balanced) indicated that younger age groups produced more +b landmark features than seven-year-olds did, showing that the development of obstruents was not completed by the age of six. A multiple regression showed that the participants' speech intelligibility scores could be predicted by landmark features. Additionally, the +b landmark feature demonstrated the strongest net effect on speech intelligibility scores. The findings indicated that: (a) the landmark feature +b was an essential indicator of speech development in child Mandarin and; (b) the consonantal development in child Mandarin could be predicted by the physiological complexity of the articulatory gestures. Future studies focusing on a wider range of population (e.g., typically developing adults, aging and other clinical groups) with different language backgrounds are encouraged to apply landmark-based acoustic analysis to trace the linguistic development of a particular group.

Keywords: Mandarin Chinese; acoustics; consonant; landmark analysis; language acquisition.

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Conflict of interest statement

The author declares no conflict of interest.

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