Lexical Stress Matures Late in Typically Developing Children

Previous studies on the development of lexical stress production in English include narrow age ranges. We addressed this issue by eliciting acoustic data from 253 typically developing 3-12 year olds and adults. Here we report a subset of results from our larger study. We report the results from 12 weak-strong (WS) words. WS words may be more challenging for English speaking children due to trochaic bias. We measured stress contrastivity (duration, intensity and fundamental frequency) across the first two syllables of each correct word production using the normalized pairwise variability index (PVI). While word productions were intelligible and exhibited stress contrastivity, generally, children did not exhibit adult-like magnitudes of stress contrastivity.