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The Workshop on Prosodic Development is hosted by the Universitat Pompeu Fabra on April 16th, 2010.
The main goal of this one-day workshop is to discuss different aspects of the children’s prosodic development in different languages. The project members will present the results of two recent projects related to “Rhythmic and Intonational
Development in Catalan, English, and Spanish”, financed both by the Generalitat de
Catalunya (Batista i Roca projects) and by the British Academy. Invited speakers will present their work on a variety of aspects related to phonological development.
Discussions will address specific questions regarding the influence of languagespecific distributional and frequency properties on language development and also the influence of general production and perception constraints. One of the goals will be to try to bridge the gap between perception and production studies in prosodic development.
We are grateful to the UPF's Departament de Traducció i Ciències del Llenguatge for their financial support of this workshop.
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09:00–09:30 WELCOME – RECEPTION
09:30–10:15 On the acquisition of word stress and Intonation:
Evidence from early perception
Paula Fikkert & Aoju Chen
Radboud University & Max Planck Institute
10:15–11:00 Stress pattern preference in Spanish-learning infants:
The importance of syllable weight
Ferran Pons & Laura Bosch
Universitat de Barcelona
11:00–11:30 COFFEE BREAK
11:30–12:15 Prosodic structure in early child speech:
Evidence from intonation, tempo, and coda production
Sónia Frota
University of Lisbon
12:15–13:00 How do German-Spanish bilingual children ask questions in their two languages?
Conxita Lleo & Martin Rakow
Hamburg University
13:00–14:30 LUNCH
14:30–15:15 Variation in intonational marking of topic and focus in children
Aoju Chen
Max Planck Institute
PRESENTATION OF PROJECT RESULTS
15:15–15:45 Speech rhythm as durational marking of prosodic heads and edges.
Evidence from Catalan, English, and Spanish
Pilar Prieto & Maria del Mar Vanrell
ICREA-Universitat Pompeu Fabra & Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona-Universitat
Pompeu Fabra
15:45–16:15 Phonological factors in rhythmic development: A cross-linguistic study
Brechtje Post
Cambridge University page
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16:15–16:45 Early acquisition of word-level prosody
Lluïsa Astruc
The Open University - Cambridge University
16:45–17:15 Early intonational development in Catalan and Spanish
Maria del Mar Vanrell & Pilar Prieto
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona-Universitat Pompeu Fabra & ICREA-Universitat
Pompeu Fabra
17:15–17:45 Prosodic manipulation in child-directed speech: a cross-linguistic study
Elinor Payne
University of Oxford
17:45–18:15 COFFEE BREAK
18:15–19:00 Rhythm cues and language discrimination in infancy: a review
Laura Bosch
Universitat de Barcelona
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Paula Fikkert 1 & Aoju Chen 2
1 Radboud University Nijmegen, 2 Max Plank Institute
Background and aims. Dutch children’s early disyllabic words are typically trochaic. Their first two-word utterances are declaratives with H*L pitch accent. Acoustically, both patterns are very similar. However, before their first birthday infants can segmentize both trochaic and iambic words (Jusczyk et al., 1999) and are sensitive to intonation. This paper aims to disentangle children’s developing perceptual knowledge of word-stress and intonation.
Methods. We tested fifteen 14- and sixteen 24-month-old infants in a mispronunciation paradigm. They saw pairs of pictures with a distractor word and an iambic or trochaic target word (ballon ‘balloon’ or konijn ‘rabbit’; or schommel ‘seesaw’ en varken ‘pig’). The target words were produced with correct or incorrect word-stress in a carrier sentence that required a question intonation (L*H H%) (Zie je het konijn? ‘Do you see the rabbit?’) or in a carrier sentence that required a statement intonation (H*L). The intonation was either appropriate for the carrier sentence, or inappropriate.
Results. The results for iambic targets in question sentences show that both word stress and intonation play a role. Word stress is less important for the 24-month-olds, but intonation remains important for word recognition. The results of the other conditions are currently being analysed.
Conclusion. Children develop knowledge of intonation and word-stress independently, and show knowledge of both at 24 months.
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Ferran Pons & Laura Bosch
Universitat de Barcelona
Infants’ sensitivity toward prosodic information of the speech input is already present early in life (i.e., Mehler et al., 1988). Attunement of early sensitivities to the specific prosodic characteristics of the input can be identified by emergent attention biases observed in infants’ prosodic preferences. Studies with English- and German-learning infants observed a bias toward trochaic words (the most frequent lexical stress pattern in these languages), but a trochaic preference could no be found in French-learning infants (Jusczyk, Cutler, & Redanz,
1993; Höhle, Bijeljac-Babic, Herold, Weissenborn, & Nazzi, 2009). An explanation for this bias is thus attributed to the language infants are exposed to. Here we present results from studies with Spanish-learning infants that challenge the proposal of a general or universal trochaic bias and add more evidence to the importance of the speech input characteristics infants are exposed to. Spanish differs from English in its general rhythmic pattern, predominant lexical types, lexical stress assignment rules, and the distribution of trochaic and iambic words in the lexicon. Spanish also differs from French in its lexical stress properties, but these two languages share the syllable as the basic rhythmic unit.
We first explored 9-month-old Spanish-learning infants’ lexical stress preferential patterns and no clear trochaic preference could be found (Pons & Bosch, 2007). To further analyze stress preference patterns we focused on syllable weight, a factor that plays a role in stress assignment in Spanish and that can be related to the emergence of lexical stress preferences
(Pons & Bosch, 2010). Our results revealed that in Spanish syllable weight turned out to be a crucial aspect for a lexical stress preference to be observed in infants (either trochaic or iambic). These new results broaden our current knowledge on the factors that play a role in the emergence of a preference bias for the native language pattern of word stress.
Our results would suggest that Spanish-learning infants’ preference patterns are not based on general rhythmic properties of the most frequent words in their language (trochaic disyllables), but on more specific knowledge that involves linking stress information to syllable structure
References
Höhle, B., Bijeljac-Babic, R., Herold, B., Weissenborn, J., & Nazzi, T. (2009). The development of language specific prosodic preferences during the first year of life: Evidence from German and French. Infant
Behavior and Development, 32, 262–274.
Jusczyk, P. W., Cutler, A., & Redanz, N. (1993). Preference for the predominant stress pattern of English words. Child Development, 64, 675–687.
Mehler, J., Jusczyk, P., Lambertz, G., Halsted, N., Bertoncini, J., & Amiel-Tison, C. (1988). A precursor of language acquisition in young infants. Cognition, 29, 143–178.
Pons, F. & Bosch, L. (2007). The perception of stress patterns by Spanish and Catalan infants. In: P.
Prieto, J. Mascaró, & M. J. Solé (Eds.). Segmental and prosodic issues in (Romance) Linguistics. Current
Issues in Linguistic Theory. John Benjamins, Amsterdam (pp. 199-218)
Pons, F. & Bosch, L. (to appear in 2010). Stress pattern preference in Spanish-learning infants: the role of syllable weight, Infancy, 15(3).
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Sónia Frota
University of Lisbon
Recent studies on prosodic development in European Portuguese (EP) have independently gathered production data on intonational development, word stress, and duration patterns at segmental, syllabic and phrasal levels, in early child speech (Frota & Vigário 2008a,b, Frota &
Matos 2009, Matos 2010, Frota et al. in progress). Intonational patterns were analysed, namely the inventory of pitch accents and boundary tones and their realizations, together with the patterns of pitch accent distribution in one-word and multiword phrases. Word stress was considered taking into account pitch accent type and the presence/absence of a pitch accent in the relevant syllable, as well as the syllable position in the utterance or intonational phrase
(IP). The analysis of duration patterns included the duration of intervocalic stop consonants, the duration of syllables as a function of word stress, position in the prosodic word (PW) and position in the IP, and the duration of syllables and PWs as a function of the number of syllables within a given domain, namely the PW and the IP. The empirical database consists of the speech of one EP child, from 1;00 to 2;04. In the present talk, these data will be described and discussed in an integrated way with the goal of answering to the following question: what does intonation and tempo tell us about the development of prosodic structure? In particular, we will put into test the path of development in three stages suggested in Frota & Vigário
(2008b). A related question also to be addressed is whether the child uses the acquired prosodic structure to constrain the development of other aspects of phonology. Coda development data of the same child will be shown to provide evidence in this direction (Jordão
2009, Jordão & Frota 2009).
In initial productions (until 1;04), disyllabic targets, if uttered with two syllables, tend to be produced with one pitch accent per syllable (usually the falling accent), and level stress predominates. The intervocalic stop consonant in these productions is realized with a duration longer than its counterpart in productions showing just one pitch accent and similar to the duration of the stop interval between two target words (Demuth & McCullough 2009 also use interval duration as evidence for PW status). PW duration, in this period, and unlike in later production, is not correlated with number of syllables per PW. Position in the PW or the IP is irrelevant for syllable duration. These findings strongly suggest that the syllable is being treated as a PW and a prosodic phrase. After 1;04, targets are uttered with one accent and patterns of stress shift predominate over level stress, showing an interaction with pitch accent type (which may be explained along the lines of de Lacy 2002, 2007, Yip 2007). These facts indicate that syllables coincide no longer with PWs. However, the relation between number of pitch accents an number of PWs is very close, and the position of the syllable in the IP is still irrelevant for syllable duration, suggesting that each PW is treated as a prosodic phrase. At
1;09 a temporal reorganization occurs at phrase level, as shown by the U-shaped correlation pattern between syllable duration and number of syllables in the IP. After this reorganization, syllables that are prosodically final become longer, or in other words, final lengthening emerges. Further, the close relation between number of pitch accents and number of PWs is broken, with many more PWs being unaccented (matching the pitch accent distribution of the
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language). These facts indicate that PWs and prosodic phrases are now treated differently. This same difference is shown by coda development data: codas start to be treated at IP prominent and IP final positions, and not at PW prominent or final positions.
Taken together, these findings strongly suggest a path of development in the acquisition of prosodic structure along the lines proposed in Frota & Vigário (2008b): an initial stage where there is a matching between syllable, PW, and phrase; a second stage where PW and phrase match; and a third stage where the three basic prosodic domains are fully independent
(syllable≈PW≈phrase>> syllable≠PW≈phrase>> syllable≠PW≠phrase
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Conxita Lleó & Martin Rakow
Research Center on Multilingualism, University of Hamburg
From various interrogative sentences described in the literature, both in Spanish and
German, we have focused on the most common ones in early child production, namely those seeking information. In both languages, information-seeking yes/no questions show a fallingrising contour and wh-questions have a rising-falling contour. Yes/no interrogative utterances in the target languages, German and Spanish, exhibit four comparable intonation points: a first peak, a falling F0, an L and a final H%. However, there are differences regarding the alignment and scaling of H and L tones across the two languages. Yes/no questions by German and
Spanish monolinguals and German-Spanish bilinguals aged 2;0 and 3;0 are analyzed, with the aim of finding out whether children at these ages have already acquired the intonation contours of these questions. Results show that monolingual children already produce both the
F0 contours as well as the alignment and scaling of the four crucial points before 3;0, whereas bilinguals correctly produce the contours, but some of them tend to not differentiate alignment and/or scaling in the two languages. Information-seeking wh-questions are also characterized by four comparable points in both languages: a first peak, a falling F0, an L and a final L%, which again show differences of alignment and scaling across the two languages.
Results based on the production of information-seeking wh-questions by the same children are comparable: whereas monolingual children produce not only the intonation points but also alignment and scaling target-like in the two languages, bilinguals tend to produce indistinguishable alignment and scaling in their two languages. Some theoretical consequences of these results are discussed, with the aim of trying to sort out those constructs that because of their added semantic import must be characterized as phonemic, from the phonetic ones, without added semantic import, which may lead to later acquisition, especially in the bilingual condition.
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Aoju Chen
Max Planck Institute
It has long been recognised that children acquire different aspects of language (e.g. Mean
Length of Utterance, vocabulary size, vocabulary comprehension, syntactic complexity) in different rates. Further, children can also differ in the development stages or route of development (Wells 1986). In this talk, I will consider variations in intonational realisation of topic and focus in Dutch 4- to 5-year-olds. Specifically, I will discuss the differences between a group of 4- to 5-year-olds with a ‘playful’ manner of speaking (characterised with a wide pitch span, more pitch dynamics, intra-speakers variations in voice quality) and a group of 4- to 5year-olds with a more consistent and everyday speaking style. In the light of these data, I will present hypotheses on differences in both rate and route of development regarding intonational realisation of topic and focus and suggest methods addressing these hypotheses.
References
Wells, G. (1986). Variation in child language. In P. Fletcher & M. Garman (eds.), Language acquisition: studies in first language development (2nd edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Pilar Prieto 1,2 & Maria del Mar Vanrell 3,2
1 ICREA, 2 Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 3 Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
One of the unsolved issues in the phonetic sciences is the quest for reliable acoustic correlates of perceived differences in linguistic rhythm present in the speech signal and which allow human (and certain animals) to distinguish languages according to rhythmic classes. One of the leading views on this issue is that the rhythm percept reflects language-specific phonological properties, which in turn are signaled by the acoustic/phonetic properties of speech. Various metrics based on variability in the duration of consonantal and vocalic intervals, and the comparative proportions of vocalic and consonantal intervals have partially succeeded in relating the durational properties of the speech signal with traditional rhythm types (Ramus et al. 1999, Grabe & Low 2002, Low, Grabe & Nolan 2000, Dellwo 2004, 2006, among others; for a review, see White & Mattys 2007a). These measures are known to be partially dependent on the syllabic structure types that are present in the language.
The goal of this study is to examine the extent to which the rhythmic differences perceived between three languages that are reported to belong to different rhythmic classes (English:
‘stress-timed’, Spanish: ‘syllable-timed’, Catalan: ‘intermediate’) are attributable to effects of syllable structure. Data from a total of 24 speakers reading 720 utterances from these languages clearly show that differences in the rhythmic metrics - in particular, the vocalic variability measures, nPVI-V, ΔV, and VarcoV - emerge even when syllable structure is controlled for in the experimental materials, at least between English on the one hand and
Spanish/Catalan on the other. This strongly suggests that important differences in durational processes exist in these languages, and thus that the rhythmic percept is not solely dependent on the presence of these two phonological properties in a given language. The consonantal interval variability metrics ΔC and VarcoC are not able to discriminate between languages when syllable structure is controlled for, and would therefore appear purely to capture phonotactic differences, and any rhythmic effects resulting from these. Similarly, the interval measure %V is shown to be a much weaker indicator of rhythmic difference than vocalic variability, once syllable structure is factored out.
Further analyses of the data indicate that the rhythmic class distinctions under consideration finely correlate with differences in the way languages instantiate two prosodic timing processes, namely durational marking of prosodic heads, and prosodic boundary lengthening. These results are compatible with the findings and conclusions of a study by Fant,
Kruckenberg & Nord 1991 on Swedish, English and French, and of a recent study of two varieties of Italian (White, Payne and Mattys, 2009), which advance the hypothesis that multiple factors contribute to the perception of rhythmic differences, including prosodic timing. Our analysis finds robust crosslinguistic support in favour of a prosody-based hypothesis of linguistic rhythm.
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Brechtje Post
Cambridge University
The characteristic rhythm of a language – traditionally referred to in terms of stress- and syllable-timing – has been claimed to emerge from various phonological properties, especially vowel reduction and syllable complexity (e.g. Bertinetto 1981, Dasher and Bolinger 1982,
Roach 1982, Dauer 1983; cf. Prieto et al. submitted). If so, learning to produce an appropriate rhythmic pattern as a child depends not only on sufficient motor control, but also on the acquisition of those properties. This implies that, while rhythmic development may start early
(e.g. Nazzi et al 1998), it potentially encompasses the entire period of phonological development until approximately age 9 (Ruscello 2003).
The few existing developmental studies of rhythm production appear to support this view
(Boysson-Bardies and Vihman 1991, Grabe et al 1999, Lléo and Kehoe 2002, Payne et al. submitted), showing that rhythm in child speech follows different developmental paths depending on language, and remains un-target-like even at 6 (Payne et al. submitted). This suggests that adult-like timing emerges gradually, when language-specific phonological and prosodic properties are acquired.
In this paper, we investigate to what extent the acquisition of systemic properties like syllable structure, stress placement, phrasing and segment inventory can indeed account for cross-linguistic developmental differences in rhythm. Comparing English (stress-timed),
Spanish (syllable-timed), and Catalan (mixed/intermediate rhythm class) 2-, 4-, and 6-yearolds, we hypothesise that rhythmic differences emerge in parallel with the acquisition of phonology. Hence, cross-linguistic rhythmic differences should already be apparent at age 2, but become stronger with age, reflecting phonological and prosodic differences. Initial findings show that, although there are indeed ambient effects of syllable structure at age 2, syllable complexity cannot fully explain the findings. Factors such as stress placement and phrasing, which are some of the properties which are not yet fully acquired at 6, also play a role, supporting a more refined, multi-systemic model of rhythmic development.
References
Bertinetto, P.M. (1981). Strutture Prosodiche dell’Italiano. Firenze: Accademia della Crusca.
Boysson-Bardies, B. de, and Vihman, M.M. (1991). Adaptation to language: evidence from babbling and first words in four languages. Language 67, 297-319.
Dauer, R. M. (1983). Stress-timing and syllable-timing reanalyzed. Journal of Phonetics 11, 51-62.
Dasher, R. and Bolinger, D. (1982). On pre-accentual lengthening. Journal of the International Phonetic
Association 12, 58–69.
Grabe, E., I. Watson and B. Post (1999). The acquisition of rhythmic patterns in English and French. In
Proceedings ICPhS 1999, San Francisco, 1201-1204.
Lléo, C. and Kehoe, M. (2002). On the interaction of phonological systems in child bilingual acquisition.
International Journal of Bilingualism 6, 233–237.
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Nazzi, T., Bertoncini, J., & Mehler, J. (1998). Language discrimination by newborns: Towards an understanding of the role of rhythm. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and
Performance 24, 756-766.
Payne, E., Post, B., Astruc, L., Prieto, P. and Vanrell, M.M. (submitted). Measuring child rhythm.
Language and Speech.
Prieto, P., Astruc, L., Payne, E., and Post, B. (submitted). Prosodic temporal organization and speech rhythm. Evidence from Catalan, English, and Spanish. Speech Communication.
Ruscello, D. (2003) Phonological errors, residual. In Kent, D.R. (ed) The MIT Encyclopedia of
Communication Disorders. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 156-158.
Acknowledgements
This study is part of ‘APriL’, an international collaborative project with Lluïsa Astruc (Open University),
Elinor Payne (University of Oxford), and Pilar Prieto and Maria del Mar Vanrell (both Universitat Pompeu
Fabra), funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya (Ref. 2007 PBR 29 and Ref. 2009 PBR 00018; PI Prieto) and the British Academy (Ref. SG-51777; PI Post).
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Lluïsa Astruc
The Open University - Cambridge University
The goal of this study is to examine the acquisition of prosody at the word level (metrical patterns, stress, intonation) in early child Catalan, Spanish and English. English is the prototypical stress-timed language, with vowel reduction, and complex onsets and codas;
Spanish is the prototypical syllable-timed language, with no vowel reduction and mostly CV syllabic structure; and Catalan, which has phonological vowel reduction and some complex codas is much closer to Spanish than to English (e.g. Prieto et al 2010). Whether it is the syllabic complexity of the ambient language that influences the acquisition of word-level prosody or the statistical distribution of the metrical patterns or a combination of both, we expect to find cross-linguistic differences. In this regard, English has more monosyllabic and
SW words than both Catalan and Spanish, and Catalan, in turn, has more monosyllabic and WS words than Spanish (e.g. Prieto 2006).
Two controlled naming tasks were used: (a) to elicit increasingly complex prosodic forms (S,
WS, SW, WSW, SWW, WWS, SWSW, and SWSWW) while balancing the number of open and closed syllables across languages, (b) to elicit S and SW quasi-minimal pairs such as “key” and
“monkey”. The participants were 36 children; 12 English, 12 Catalan, and 12 Spanish, aged 2, 4 and 6 (APriL Corpus 1, http://april-project.info/corpus/).
I will report the main results of the study and discuss how these relate to current theories of phonological development.
References
Prieto, P. (2006). The relevance of metrical information in early prosodic word acquisition: A comparison of Catalan and Spanish. Language and Speech, 49, 231-259.
Prieto, P., Vanrell, M., Astruc, L., Payne, E. & Post, B. (in press). Speech rhythm as durational marking of prosodic heads and hedges. Speech Prosody 2010.
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Maria del Mar Vanrell 1,2 & Pilar Prieto 3,2
3 Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2 Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 3 ICREA
Recent studies on prosodic development have focused on the phonetic and phonological properties of early intonation contours (Kehoe et al. 1995; Prieto and Vanrell 2007; DePaolis et al. 2008; Frota and Vigário 2008; Astruc et al. 2010; Prieto et al. 2010). One of the important conclusions of these studies is that tonal alignment characteristics are mastered very early. For example, through a longitudinal study of four Catalan-speaking children and two Spanishspeaking children between the ages of 1 and 2;4 years, Prieto et al. (2010) showed that children produced the basic phonologically distinct f0 contours of their ambient language well before they produced two-word combinations, and that patterns of f0 alignment were targetlike. In addition, these f0 patterns were pragmatically adequate to signal communicative intent, confirming also some earlier accounts (Cruttenden, 1982; Marcos, 1987; Thorson et al.,
2009). Similarly, Astruc et al. (2010) analyzed naming data from twenty-four 2-, 4-, and 6-yearold English, Spanish and Catalan children and showed that in rising accents of the type L+H*
L%, children as young as two control relevant intonation parameters such as pitch height and pitch timing, although they still do not control syllable duration, and they still lengthen wordfinal syllables excessively. Kehoe et al. (1995) also found that English 18-month-olds were already capable of controlling f0, intensity, and duration to indicate stress in elicited trochaic words. Finally, for European Portuguese, Frota and Vigário (2008) showed that while the precise alignment of the leading nuclear tone in H+L* pitch accents in statements is not adultlike until 1;9, the alignment of the L+H* pitch accent, is adult-like at 1;2.
Previous studies have also identified problems in the control of pitch range in early meaningful speech (Snow and Balog 2002; Prieto and Vanrell 2007; Prieto et al. 2010). As pointed out by Snow and Balog (2002), though quantitative measures of pitch range have been rarely documented in the intonational development literature, a high proportion of “level contours” has been frequently reported in infant early productions, indicating that children in the one-word period are still learning to implement the pitch scaling patterns corresponding to different tonal units. Lleó et al. (2004) and Lleó and Rakow (2008) showed that monolingual
Spanish children do not produce the scaling properties of nuclear and prenuclear pitch accents in statements and interrogatives in a target-like way before 3;0 years of age. Similarly, Astruc et al. (2010) report that Catalan, English and Spanish children gradually expand their pitch range until they reach the adult-like target.
The main goal of this article is to examine the tonal alignment and tonal scaling patterns in early statement intonation (with one or two pitch accents) in Catalan and Spanish. Our concern is to investigate whether children have mastered the alignment of pitch accents and boundary tones in the language by the time they are two years old and in particular whether they have acquired the alignment contrasts in prenuclear vs. nuclear positions. Finally, we seek experimental evidence regarding the acquisition of tonal scaling relative to that of tonal alignment.
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References
Astruc, L., Prieto, P., Payne, E., Post, B. and Vanrell, M.M., “Acquisition of tonal targets in Catalan,
Spanish, and English”, Cambridge Occasional Papers in Linguistics, in press.
Cruttenden, A. How Long Does Intonation Acquisition Take? Papers and Reports on Child Language
Development 21, 112-118, 1982.
DePaolis, R.A., Vihman, M.M. and Kunnari, S., “Prosody in production at the onset of word use: A crosslinguistic study”, Journal of Phonetics, 36: 406-422, 2008.
Frota, S. and Vigário, M., “The intonation of one-word and first two-word utterances in European
Portuguese”, paper presented at the XI International Conference for the Study of Child Language
Conference (IASCL), 2008.
Kehoe, M., Stoel-Gammon, C., & Buder, E. H. (1995). Acoustic correlates of stress in young children’s speech. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 38, 338-350.
Lleó, C. and Rakow, M., “Yes-no questions by Spanish and German monolingual and bilingual 2;6- and
3;0-year-olds: Alignment, Scaling and the grammatical units of intonation”, in T. Kupisch and E. Rin
[Eds.], The development of grammar: language acquisition and diachronic change, Hamburger Studies on Multilingualism, 11, 2008.
Lleó, C., Rakow, M. and Kehoe, M., “Acquisition of language-specific pitch accent by Spanish and
German monolingual and bilingual children”, in T.L. Face [Ed.], Laboratory Approaches to Spanish
Phonology, Mouton de Gruyter, 2004.
Marcos, H. Communicative functions of pitch range and pitch direction in infants. Journal of Child
Language 14, 255-68, 1987.
Prieto, P. and Vanrell, M.M., “Early intonational development in Catalan”, Proceedings of the XVIth
International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, edited by Jürgen Trouvain and William J. Barry: 309-314,
Pirrot GmbH: Dudweiler, 2007.
Prieto, P., Estrella, A., Thorson, J. and Vanrell, M.M., “Is prosodic development correlated with grammatical and lexical development? Evidence from emerging intonation in Catalan and Spanish”,
Journal of Child Language, submitted.
Snow, D. and Balog, H. L., “Do children produce the melody before the words? A review of developmental intonation research”, Lingua, 112: 1025-1058, 2002.
Thorson, J., Borràs-Comes, J., Crespo-Sendra, V., Vanrell, M. M. & Prieto, P. The acquisition of melodic form and meaning by Catalan and Spanish speaking children. Paper presented at the Phonetics and
Phonology in Iberia 2009, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, 2009.
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Elinor Payne
University of Oxford
A widely documented characteristic of child-directed speech (CDS) is the modification of certain prosodic parameters (e.g. higher and greater range of pitch; longer duration; slower speech rate and more prominent final lengthening (see e.g. Albin & Echols, 1996; Fernald &
Mazzie 1991; Fernald & Simon 1984; Garnica, 1977; Grieser & Kuhl 1988). From a functional point of view, it has been argued that the richness of prosodic cues in CDS may actively function to attract and maintain the attention of the child (Fernald & Simon, 1984; Stern et al,
1982), communicate affective information (Werker & McLeod, 1989) and facilitate language acquisition by, for example, highlighting linguistic structure and aiding word identification
(Fernald & Mazzie, 1991; Cooper & Aslin, 1989; Gleitman et al, 1988; Hirsh-Pasek et al, 1987;
Kemler Nelson et al, 1989).
This paper reports the findings of a cross-linguistic study of prosodic modifications in CDS
(for English, Catalan and Spanish, spoken to children aged 2, 4 ad 6 years), when compared with adult-directed speech (ADS) in the same languages. In particular, we examine modifications in i) speech rhythm, and ii) prosodic lengthening. Since Dominey and Dodane
(2004: 128) claim that ‘the essential acoustic property of CDS is the exaggeration or modulation of characteristics that are already present in ADS’, a key objective was to verify whether any observable prosodic modifications can indeed be interpreted as phonetic
exaggerations of properties present in ADS, or whether something more structurally complex may be occurring.
For rhythm, applying interval-based metrics (see White & Mattys, 2007), we found characteristic cross-linguistic differences observed in ADS for these languages to be present, but weakened in CDS. Regardless of language and its presumed rhythmic category, CDS was more ‘vocalic’ and more even-timed (lower variability in vocalic and consonantal interval duration) than its ADS equivalent. This signifies neither an exaggeration of ADS prosodic properties, nor a wholesale accommodation to the rhythmic properties of child speech (which showed more even-timing in vocalic duration, but not in consonants, see Payne et al, under
revision; Post, this workshop). We conclude that the cross-linguistic tendency for more even timing is more likely to be an artifact of the adult accommodating to the (perceived) communicative needs of the child (i.e. speaking more clearly), than a conscious effort to accommodate to the child’s own speech patterns.
For the study of prosodic lengthening, we found a cross-linguistic tendency to prioritise
(and emphasise) final lengthening, while suppressing other prosodic cues. Thus, in both English and Catalan, CDS presented a more selective system of prosodic marking by duration than
ADS. Specifically, English CDS appeared to suppress phrase-initial lengthening and the distinction between stressed and unstressed syllables (at least when not in or next to the nuclear accented syllable), while prioritizing phrase-final lengthening. Catalan appeared to suppress lengthening of nuclear accents, while also prioritizing phrase-final lengthening. One result of this is that there was greater uniformity of syllable duration, which may explain the more even rhythm observed in CDS.
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References
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Laura Bosch
Universitat de Barcelona
In the speech perception domain, one of the first abilities that can be observed in very young infants is a language discrimination capacity. After habituation to a set of utterances from a specific language, newborns show dishabituation behaviour when presented with utterances that belong to a language from a different rhythm class, that is, a language with notable differences in its general prosodic (rhythm and intonation) characteristics (Ramus,
2002; Ramus et al., 1999). Behavioural data from infant studies confirm that early language discrimination abilities are initially restricted to languages that differ in these gross prosodic properties (Mehler et al., 1988; Nazzi et al. 1998). Through continued exposure to the ambient language infants around 2 months of age begin to establish a primary level of representation of the sound pattern of the native language (Christophe & Morton, 1998). By 4 to 5 months of age they eventually succeed at differentiating languages that belong to the same rhythmic class (Bosch & Sebastián-Gallés, 1997; Nazzi et al, 2000). Although a definitive explanation for the gains in language discrimination abilities observed in the first months of life is still lacking, it was suggested that they are probably related to the infants’ having access to more subtle prosodic cues in the pairs of languages to be contrasted. However, frequency and distributional information regarding segments in the language can also offer relevant cues for language discrimination, as languages also differ in their segmental inventories and infants’ ability to track statistical information in the speech signal is present very early on. In this talk, data on infants’ abilities to discriminate between dialects that share rhythm properties but differ in vowel repertoires (such as Eastern vs. Western Catalan) will be presented and contrasted with more recent data revealing an unexpected late discrimination for languages that differ in rhythm properties, but share a common five-vowel system (such as Spanish and
Basque). The role of variables related to the procedures and the material used to test infants’ language discrimination abilities will also be considered in interpreting the experimental evidence.
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Ramus, F. (2002). Language discrimination by newborns: teasing apart phonotactic, rhythmic and intonational cues. Annual Review of Language Acquisition, 2, 85-115.
Ramus, F., Nespor, M. & Mehler, J. (1999). Correlates of linguistic rhythm in the speech signal. Cognition,
73, 265-292.
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