These data form a part of a longitudinal study of vowel system formation for Russian language. The goal of this investigation is to examine the process of vowels spectral characteristics dynamics from child speech to the corresponding values in normal Russian adult speech. The vowels from vocalizations and words of 5 Russian children from 3 to 60 months of age were analyzed. The spectral features of the vowels recognized by native speakers as corresponding Russian phonemes were taken into account. It was shown that the formants characteristics do not correspond to those in adults' speech yet, but they differ from vowel to vowel at 3-5 years of age. Many sounds at each age are impossible to describe by means of classical acoustic keys, but native speakers attributed these sounds to certain categories with high probability. To describe these sounds we use an additional system of distinctive features.

 

 

 

The purpose of this investigation is to examine the process of acoustic features of vowels from child speech approaching corresponding values in the normal Russian adult speech. The vowels formants structure, pitch and vowels duration were examined. Word stress and palatal context influence on the formants structure of the vowels were taken into account. It was shown that the word stress is formed by 6?7 years of age on the basis of the feature typical for Russian language. Formant structure of Russian vowels /u/ and /i/ is not formed by the age of 7 years. Native speakers recognize the meaning of 57?93% words in speech of 6 and 7-years-old children.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Виртуальная реальность или реальная виртуальность? Человек. Сознание. Коммуникация. Москва: Диалог-МГУ, 1998, 352 с.

«Свой» среди «чужих»: миф или реальность? Москва: Гнозис, 2003, 375 с.

St. Petersburg Linguistic Society

 

 

 

Co-ordinator — Tatiana V. Chernigovskaya

 

St. Petersburg Psycholinguistic Seminar was founded by L.V.Sakharny and A.S. Stern in the 80-ies of the XX century. It unites researchers of St. Petersburg and some other cities of Russia. Most of the dissertations defended during the last 20 years have been discussed within the seminar. T.V.Chernigovskaya, currently being the head of St. Petersburg School of Psycholinguistics, was a secretary of the seminar from the very beginning. L.V.Sakharny was the first to start teaching a course in Psycholinguistics that later was acknowledged as one of the core course in the curriculum of the Department of General Linguistics. A.S. Stern, a student and a follower of L.R. Zinder was the author of courses in Statistics and in Psychology for linguists.

 

 

 

 

Acquisition of scrambling is a complex process that reflects the interaction of different types of knowledge: syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. It has been shown that scrambling is linked to specificity1 and definiteness in that the changes in the word order and semantic interpretation of a scrambled element interact (see Schaeffer 2000a, Barbier 2000, Krämer 2000, Avrutin and Brun 2001, Dyakonova 2004, Ilić and Deen 2004, Unsworth 2005, inter alia). Three major approaches to the acquisition of different aspects of this complex phenomenon have been discussed in the literature.