ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2002
ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2002

Acquisition of prosody in Russian

Natalia N. Zharkova

In this study, a 1.5-hour conversation of a three-year-old Russian girl and her mother was audiotaped and analysed. The speech of the girl is not typical of her normally developing peers, as many vowels and consonants are substituted by different ones, and segmental information is no more sufficient for adequate semantic interpretation. The present study shows that although the child’s speech is deviant in some way, the girl has acquired most of the intonation models of the native language, which is normal for three-year-old Russian children.