Variability in the Speech of Children in Dutch: A Phonetic Analysis of Vowel Consistency using Picture Naming

This paper examines the degree of consistency in the vowel production among children aged 4 to 12 and adult participants. The study employed picture naming tasks in recording the participants’ voices. The primary objective of this research was to investigate the hypothesis that vowel production becomes more consistent with increasing age. Two distinct tests were conducted for data analysis: a control test to assess the significance of differences between the adult and child participant groups, and a regression analysis to determine the significance of age-related effects within the child participant group. However, neither test revealed any significant effects. The absence of significant findings can be attributed to certain limitations of the study, which are discussed. This research aims to contribute to the understanding of vowel production consistency across different age groups, while emphasising the need for further exploration and refinement of the experimental design to achieve more conclusion results.This paper was written for a Ba course assignment