Acoustic characteristics of /s/ in adolescents

The goal of the current study was to construct a reference database against which misarticulations of /s/ con be compared. Acoustic data for 26 typica lly speaking 9- to 15-year-olds were examined to resolve measurement issues in acoustic analyses, including alternative sampling points within the /s/ frication; the informativeness of linear venus Bark transformations of eac h of the 4 spectral moments of /s/ (Forrest, Weismer, Milenkovic, & Dougall , 1988); and measurement effects associated with linguistic context, age, a nd sex. Analysis of the reference data set indicates that acoustic characte rization of /s/ is appropriately and optimally (a) obtained from the midpoi nt of /s/, (b) represented in linear scale, (c) reflected in summary statis tics for the 1st and 3rd spectral moments, (d) referenced to individual lin guistic-phonetic contexts, (e) collapsed across the age range studied, and (f) described individually by sex.