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An Acoustic Analysis Of Elements Of Contrastive Stress Produced By 8 To 10-Year-Old Children, Nicole Michelle Clover

Theses and Dissertations

Contrastive stress is an aspect of communication that can be used to highlight information, de-accent redundant information, and create distinctions between new and previously-provided information. Previous research has documented that adult speakers use relative changes in their vocal intensity, fundamental frequency (F0), and duration to mark contrastive stress in a sentence. However, less is understood about how and when children mark contrastive stress in their communication, thus the current study aims to examine a number of acoustic elements of contrastive stress in 8 to 10-year-old children. Speech samples were elicited from 20 children and analyzed to determine if the acoustic …