Produktion och perception av ordaccenter hos femåriga östgötska barn med typisk språkutveckling
The Swedish language contains contrasts of tonal word accents, realized by change in the F0 contour. Contrasts of word accents require at least two syllables with stress on the first syllable of the word or a stressed syllable followed by a non-stressed.The purpose of the present study was to examine how five-year-old children living in Östergötland with typical language development produce and discriminate tonal word accents. In addition, it was investigated how these abilities affect each other and comparisons were made to a similar study on children living in Skåne.For elicitation of tonal word accents a set of pictures with contrastive tonal word accents was used. The children were recorded and their answers were evaluated by visual classification of their F0-curves. In a perceptual analysis of the children?s productions, 11 linguistically naive listeners evaluated 44 randomized words from the recordings. For the evaluation of the children?s perceptual ability a recording of the words was made. The words were presented randomly and the children were asked to point at the picture, which in their opinion, matched the word from the recording.The results show that the children have difficulties producing tonal word accents. The acoustic analysis for words with accent 1 agrees more with the model than words with accent 2, while the naive listeners more easily perceived words with accent 2. In accordance with the naive listeners, the children also perceived words with accent 2 more easily.