Hostname: page-component-76d6cb85b7-hqrjx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-07-23T02:04:55.181Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Listener reliability in assigning utterance boundaries in children's spontaneous speech

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 June 2010

IDA J. STOCKMAN
IDA J. STOCKMAN*
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Ida J. Stockman, Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders, Oyer Building, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824. E-mail: stockma1@msu.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Research and clinical practices often rely on an utterance unit for spoken language analysis. This paper calls attention to the problems encountered when identifying utterance boundaries in young children's spontaneous conversational speech. The results of a reliability study of utterance boundary assignment are described for 20 females with graduate professional education in speech–language pathology. They judged audiorecorded spontaneous speech samples that were elicited from 4-year-old children. Their agreement with each other (interobserver) was significantly lower than their self-agreement (intraobserver). Interobserver agreement varied with the length/grammatical complexity of response turns, and the number and types of selective boundary cues presented in the speech stimuli. The findings have research and clinical implications for the utterance as a conceptual notion and its use constraints.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , July 2010 , pp. 363 - 395
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

REFERENCES

Ambrosia, N. G., & Yairi, E. (1999). Normative disfluency data for early childhood stuttering. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 42, 895–909.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Austin, D., & Shriberg, L. (1997). Lifespan reference data for ten measures of articulation competence using the speech disorders classification system (SDCS). Phonology Project Technical Report No. 3. Madison, WI: University of Wisconson–Madison, Waisman Center.Google Scholar
Bailey, K. G. D., & Ferreira, F. (2003). Disfluencies affect the parsing of garden-variety sentences. Journal of Memory and Language, 49, 183–200.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baldwin, D. V. (1984). Assessing significance in early dyadic interactions: A comparative perspective. In Feagans, L., Garvey, C., & Golinkoff, R. (Eds.), The origins and growth of communication (pp. 30–56). New York: Ablex.Google Scholar
Beach, C. M., Katz, W. F., & Skowronski, A (1996). Children's processing of prosodic cues for phrasal interpretation. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 99, 1148–1160.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bowen, C. (2006). Speech intelligibility from 12 to 48 months. Wentworth Falls, Australia: Author. Retrieved December 28, 2008, from www.speech-language-therapy.com/intelligibility.htmGoogle Scholar
Brotherton, P. (1979). Speaking and not speaking: Processes for translating ideas into speech. In Siegman, A. W. & Feldstein, S. (Eds.), Of speech and time: Temporal speech patterns in interpersonal contexts. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Chafe, W., & Danielewicz, J. (1987). Properties of spoken and written language. In Horowitz, R. & Samuels, S. J. (Eds.), Comprehending oral and written language (pp. 83–113). New York: Academic Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Choi, Y., & Mazuka, R. (2003). Young children's use of prosody in sentence parsing. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 32, 197–217.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Clark, H. M., Robin, D. A., McCullagh, G., & Schmidt, R. A. (2001). Motor control in children and adults during a non-speech oral task. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 44, 1015–1025.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Craig, H. K., Thompson, C. A., Washington, J. A., & Potter, S. L. (2003). Phonological features of child African American English. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 46, 623–635.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cruttenden, A. (1997). Intonation (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crystal, D. (1980). Neglected grammatical factors in conversational English. In Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., & Svartvik, J. (Eds.), Studies in English linguistics: For Randolph Quirk (pp. 153–166). London: Longman.Google Scholar
Crystal, D. (1992). A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics. Cambridge: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Cutler, A., Dahan, D., & van Donselaar, W. (1997). Prosody in the comprehension of spoken language: A literature review. Language and Speech, 40, 141–201.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dankovičová, J., Pigott, K., Wells, B., & Peppé, S. (2004). Temporal markers of prosodic boundaries in children's speech production. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 34, 17–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
de Pijper, J. R., & Sanderman, A. A. (1994). On the perceptual strength of prosodic boundaries and its relation to suprasegmental cues. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 96, 2037–2048.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Duez, D. (1985). Perception of silent pauses in continuous speech. Language and Speech, 28, 377–389.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Duncan, S., & Fiske, D. W. (1985). Interaction structure and strategy. London: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ernst, M. O., & Bülthoff, H. H. (2004). Merging the senses into a robust percept. Trends in Cognitive Science, 8, 162–169.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Elugardo, R., & Stainton, R. (2005). Ellipsis and nonsentential speech. Berlin: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferreira, F., Anes, M. D., & Horine, M. D. (1996). Exploring the use of prosody during language comprehension using the auditory moving window technique. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 25, 273–290.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Flipsen, P. (2002). Longitudinal changes in articulation rate and phonetic phrase length in children with speech delay. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 45, 100–110.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Garman, M. (1989). The role of linguistics in speech therapy: Assessment and interpretation. In Grunwell, P. & James, A. (Eds.), The functional evaluation of language disorders (p. 29–57). New York: Croom Helm.Google Scholar
Gerken, L. (1996). Prosody's role in language acquisition and adult parsing. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 25, 345–356.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gerken, L., Jusczyk, P. W., & Mendel, D. R. (1994). When prosody fails to cue syntactic structure: 9-month-olds’ sensitivity to phonological versus syntactic phrases. Cognition, 51, 237–265.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Goldman-Eisler, F. (1958). Speech production and the predictability of words in context. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 10, 96–102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldman-Eisler, F. (1968). Psycholinguistics: Experiments in spontaneous speech. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Green, J. R., Moore, C. A., Higashikawa, M., & Steeve, R. W. (2000). The physiological development of speech motor control: Lip and jaw coordination. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 43, 239–255.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Grosjean, F., Lane, H., Battison, R., & Teuber, H. (1981). The invariance of sentence performance structures across language modality. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 7, 216–230.Google ScholarPubMed
Hieke, A. E., Kowal, S., & O'Connell, D. C. (1983). The trouble with articulatory pauses. Language and Speech, 26, 203–214.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hirsh-Pasek, K., Nelson, D., Jusczyk, P., Cassidy, K. W., & Kennedy, L. (1987). Clauses are perceptual units for young Infants. Cognition, 26, 269–286.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hollich, G. (2006). Combining techniques to reveal emergent effects in infants’ segmentation, word learning, and grammar. Language and Speech, 49, 3–19.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hunt, K. W. (1965). Grammatical structure written at three grade levels. National Council of Teachers of English Research Report Number 3. Champaign, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.Google Scholar
Jusczyk, P. W., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Nelson, D. G. K., Kennedy, L. J., Woodward, A., & Piwoz, J. (1992). Perception of acoustic correlates of major phrasal units by young infants. Cognitive Psychology, 24, 252–293.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Katz, W. F., Beach, C. M., Jenouri, K., & Verma, S. (1996). Duration and fundamental frequency correlates of phrase boundaries in productions by children and adults. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 99, 3179–3191.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Klouda, G., & Cooper, W. (1987). Syntactic clause boundaries, speech timing, and stuttering frequency in adult stutterers. Language and Speech, 30, 263–273.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kowal, S., Wiese, R., & O'Connell, D. C. (1983). The use of time in storytelling. Language and Speech, 26, 377–392.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lindsey, J., & O'Connell, D. C. (1995). How do transcribers deal with audio recordings of spoken discourse. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 24, 101–115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Loban, W. (1976). Language development. Urbana–Champaign, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.Google Scholar
Miller, J. (1981). Assessing language production in children. Baltimore, MD: University Park Press.Google Scholar
Nicol, J. L. (1996). What can prosody tell a parser? Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 25, 179–192.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O'Connor, J. D., & Arnold, G. F. (1961). Intonation of colloquial English. London: Cambridge.Google Scholar
Oetting, J. B., & Pruitt, S. (2005). Southern African-American English use across groups. Journal of Multilingual Communication Disorders, 3, 136–144.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Owens, R. E. (2007). Language development: An introduction. New York: Allyn & Bacon.Google Scholar
Paul, R. (2001). Language disorders from infancy through adolescence: Assessment and intervention (2nd ed.). St. Louis, MO: Mosby.Google Scholar
Sabin, E. J., Clemmer, E. J., O'Connell, D. C., & Kowal, S. (1979). A pausological approach to speech development. In Siegman, A. W. & Feldstein, S. (Eds.), Of speech and time: Temporal speech patterns in interpersonal contexts (pp. 35–55). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Schraeder, T., Quinn, M., Stockman, I., & Miller, J. (1999). Authentic assessment as an approach to pre-school speech–language screening. American Journal of Speech–Language Pathology, 8, 195–200.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schuetze-Coburn, S., Shapley, M., & Weber, E. G. (1991). Units of intonation in discourse: A comparison of acoustic and auditory analyses. Language and Speech, 34, 207–234.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Seltig, M., & Couper-Kuhlen, E. (2001). Studies in interactional linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, A., & Goffman, L. (1998). Stability and patterning of speech movement sequences in children and adults. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 41, 5–17.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Snow, D. (1994). Phrase-final syllable lengthening and intonation in early child speech. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 37, 831–841.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Snow, D. (1998). Prosodic markers of syntactic boundaries in the speech of 4-year-old children with normal and disordered language development. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 41, 1158–1171.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Stockman, I. (1996). The promises and pitfalls of language sample analysis as an assessment tool for linguistic minority children. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, 27, 355–366.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stockman, I. (2008). Toward validation of a minimal competence phonetic core for African American children. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 51, 1244–1262.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Stockman, I., & Vaughn-Cooke, F. (1989). Addressing new questions about Black children's language. In Fasold, R. & Schriffrin, D. (Eds.), Language change and variation (pp. 275–300). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trueswell, J. C., Sekerina, I., Hill, N. M., & Logrip, M. L. (1999). The kindergarten-path effect: Studying on-line sentence processing in young children. Cognition, 73, 89–134.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Vaissiere, J. (2005). Perception of intonation. In Pisoni, D. B. & Remez, R. E. (Eds.). Handbook of speech perception. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Washington, J. A., & Craig, H. K. (2004). A language screening protocol for use with young African American children in urban settings. American Journal of Speech–Language Pathology, 13, 329–340.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Watkins, R. V., Kelly, D. J., Harbers, H. M., & Hollis, W. (1995). Measuring children's lexical diversity: Differentiating typical and impaired language learners. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 38, 1349–1355.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wells, B., Peppè, S., & Goulandris, N. (2004). Intonation development from five to thirteen. Journal of Child Language, 31, 749–778.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Yang, L. (2004). Duration and pauses as cues to discourse boundaries in speech. ISCA Archive. Retrieved from http://wwwisca-speech.org/archiveCrossRefGoogle Scholar