Anticipatory coarticulation is an indispensable feature of speech dynamics contributing to spoken language fluency. Research has shown that children speak with greater degrees of vowel anticipatory coarticulation than adults – that is, greater vocalic influence on previous segments. The present study examined how developmental differences in anticipatory coarticulation transfer to the perceptual domain.

Using a gating paradigm, we tested 29 seven-year-olds and 93 German adult listeners with sequences produced by child and adult speakers, hence corresponding to low versus high vocalic anticipatory coarticulation degrees. First, children predicted vowel targets less successfully than adults. Second, greater perceptual accuracy was found for low compared to highly coarticulated speech. We propose that variations in coarticulation degrees reflect perceptually important differences in information dynamics and that listeners are more sensitive to fast changes in information than to a large amount of vocalic information spread across long segmental spans.

预期的共同发音是语音动力学的一个不可或缺的特征，有助于口语流利。研究表明，与成人相比，儿童说话时的元音预发音程度更高——也就是说，对先前音节的发声影响更大。本研究检查了预期协同发音的发育差异如何转移到知觉领域。

使用门控范式，我们测试了 29 名 7 岁儿童和 93 名德国成人听众，他们使用儿童和成人说话者产生的序列，因此对应于低和高的发声预期共同发音度。首先，儿童预测元音目标的成功率低于成人。其次，与高度共同发音的语音相比，低语音的感知准确性更高。我们提出，协同发音程度的变化反映了信息动态的感知上重要的差异，并且听众对信息的快速变化比对跨越长段跨度的大量声音信息更敏感。