Intelligibility of children's speech

[Barbara Zurer Pearson]

Dear Mats,

Ana Navarro did her dissertation at UMiami in 1998 on what we called 
"language intelligibility," but a by-product was a measure of general 
intelligibility.

Words and short phrases were taken from audiotapes of 30 children, average 
age 26 months. (1/3 of the children were bilingual, but there were no 
differences by language group.)  There were some adult utterances as well, 
for comparison.  Listeners heard the utterances through headphones, playing 
them as many times as they wanted from the computer.  Their task was to 
identify what the child said.  If they couldn't say what the child said, 
they were to say which language they thought the child was speaking.  That 
was the goal of the experiment, so we discounted any utterances that the 
listener understood.  Average percentage of utterances understood was 24%.

So, this is not exactly like what you are remembering.  The utterances were 
all intelligible in the context of the original audiotapes, and they were 
presented auditorily without context.  The adult utterances in the same 
protocol were pretty much all understood.  We were amazed at the low 
percentage of the children's utterances that were understood without 
auditory--or visual--context.

The experiment was written up in ISB4:
Navarro, A., Pearson, B. Z., Cobo-Lewis, A.B., & Oller, D. K. (2005). 
Differentiation in early phonological adaptation?   In J. Cohen, K. 
McAlister, K. Rolstad, & J. MacSwan (Eds.) ISB4: Proceedings of the 4 th 
International Symposium on Bilingualism (pp.1690-1702).   Somerville, MA: 
Cascadilla Press.

I'll be interested in other measures that you hear about--and if you find 
the original article you are thinking about.

Best,
Barbara
*************************************************************
Barbara Zurer Pearson, Ph.D.
Research Associate
Depts of Linguistics & Communication Disorders
RAB, 70 Butterfield Terrace
University of Massachusetts
Amherst MA 01003

Tel: 413-545-5023
Fax: 413-545-2792

bpearson at research.umass.edu
www.umass.edu/aae/bp_indexold.htm
www.zurer.com/pearson/bilingualchild




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mats Andrén" <mats.andren at ling.lu.se>
To: "childes" <info-childes at googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 03, 2010 3:41 PM
Subject: Intelligibility of children's speech


Dear list members,

A few years ago I read an article or a book where it was stated that X
percent (a large number) of children's utterances became more or less
completely unitelligible when the video is taken away. That is, removing
the visible context and action/gesture et cetera and relying only on the
audio signal as a source of interpretation. I can't recall who wrote it
(it *could* have been Eve Clark or Jana Iverson). Neither am I able to
remember whether it was a result of an experimental study of some kind,
or some more sweeping approximation. I also do not remember the age of
the children involved, but it should have been some time during their
second year of life (maybe earlier). Precisely due to all this
uncertainity, I would be most grateful if any of you would be able to
point me to information about these matters. Any publication that deals
with this question is of interest.

Have a nice day!

Best regards,
Mats Andrén,
PhD student in General Linguistics,
Centre for Languages and Literature/Centre for Cognitive Semiotics,
Lund University,
Sweden

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