The present study is a qualitative and quantitative interdisciplinary investigation of
young children's vocal development. It investigated how vocalizations of young children
mutate in relation to the children's linguistic and musical development, and the contexts in
which these developments take place.
Eight girls age eighteen to thirty-eight months participated in this study. Four
spoke Chinese and four spoke English as their first language. Each child was visited every
four to six months over a 42 month period. Acoustic analyses were performed on recorded
vocal responses, and three judges classified the vocalizations and provided perceptual
evaluation.
It appears that young children have established communicative pitches that are
associated with different forms of vocalizations by age two. All children consistently sang
with higher fundamental frequencies than they used for speaking, while other forms of
vocalization appear to be positioned consistently between singing and speaking.
Both the mean fundamental frequency data and the qualitative data suggest some
possible differences in vocal pitch behaviours across language. Chinese bilingual children
made comparatively less but stable distinction between their speech and song; in their
acoustic intermediate vocalizations however, the boundary between speech and song was
"fuzzy". English monolingual children made increasingly clearer and wider acoustical
distinctions between their speech and songs; their contextual intermediate vocalizations
were made up of intermittent singing and speaking.
The intermediate vocalizations observed in the present study appear to confirm that
singing and speaking are two vocal phenomena that exist along a continuum. They call into
question the entire concept of differences between singing and speaking both acoustically
and contextually. These intermediate vocalizations offer a rich account of the linguistic and
musical development of a child; they suggest that while first spoken language appears to
affect vocal development, a child's non-speech auditory environment is also crucial to the
understanding of her vocal behaviours.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/10017 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Mang, Esther Ho Shun |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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