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among children and none of the participants were aware that holds
and speech pauses were of interest.
The Pearson correlation coefficient computed to measure the
amount of information about speech pause frequency from the known
hold frequency resulted in τ = 0.72, and τ 2 = 0.52 for 3 year olds; τ =
0.18, and τ 2 = 0.03 for 5 year olds; τ = 0.83, and τ 2 = 0.70 for 9 year olds;
and τ = 0.88, and τ 2 = 0.78 for adults.
A high correlation between holds and speech pauses was found
for all the groups, except for the 5-year-old children. Analyzing the
distribution of hold and speech pause rates (as displayed in Figure
2, for the 3-, 5- and 9-year-old groups) it is possible to notice that the
number and length of speech pauses in the 5-year-old children was
signifi cantly higher than the number and length of holds. In addition,
speech pause rates are differently distributed with respect to the
remaining groups, independently of the child gender. Five-year-old
children remain often silent, independently of the length of their
narration and the language skills, even though they possess a more
sophisticated language competence with respect to the 3-year-old
children. A possible explanation for this result can be attributed to
the emergent consciousness of the self with respect to the others that
children acquire around 5 years (Leslie et al., 2004) assigning a social
value to their performance. This may have forced them to put extra
care in reporting their narrations increasing the number of pauses
(socio-psychological pauses) in their speech.
Despite the abovementioned inconsistency, all the reported data
seem to prove that, at least some aspects of speech and gestures reflect
a unified planning process, similar in all humans and independent of
the particular language of expression and age. Acting in synchrony,
Figure 2. Averaged pause (white) and hold (black) rate values with the associated standard
deviation (Sd) values along the speech for the three differently aged child groups.
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