Does sentential prosody help infants organize and remember speech information?
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Cited by (88)
“The tiger is hitting! the duck too!” 3-year-olds can use prosodic information to constrain their interpretation of ellipsis
2021, CognitionCitation Excerpt :Several studies propose that the suprasegmental cues of speech (e.g., pitch, duration, energy, etc.) constitute a very important set of cues for the beginning of lexical and syntactic acquisition, as they indicate, among other things, prosodic phrase boundaries (Christophe, Dautriche, de Carvalho, & Brusini, 2016; Christophe, Millotte, Bernal, & Lidz, 2008; de Carvalho, Dautriche, Millotte, & Christophe, 2018; Hawthorne & Gerken, 2014; Hawthorne, Mazuka, & Gerken, 2015; Massicotte-Laforge & Shi, 2015, 2020; Morgan & Demuth, 1996). Young children have been shown to know a great deal about their native language's prosodic structure, and to use this knowledge for many different aspects of sentence parsing: for sentence disambiguation (e.g., Dautriche et al., 2014; de Carvalho, Dautriche, & Christophe, 2016; de Carvalho, Dautriche, Lin, & Christophe, 2017; de Carvalho, Lidz, Tieu, Bleam, & Christophe, 2016; Snedeker & Yuan, 2008; Zhou, Su, Crain, Gao, & Zhan, 2011), for word and sentence segmentation (e.g., Bailey & Plunkett, 1998; Gervain & Werker, 2013; Graf Estes & Bowen, 2013; Hirsh-Pasek et al., 1987; Johnson, 2008; Johnson & Seidl, 2008; Jusczyk et al., 1992; Mandel, Jusczyk, & Kemler Nelson, 1994; Ramachers, Brouwer, & Fikkert, 2017; Shukla, White, & Aslin, 2011; Soderstrom, Seidl, Kemler Nelson, & Jusczyk, 2003); to decide whether a utterance is declarative or interrogative (e.g., Zhou, Crain, & Zhan, 2012); and for grammatical categorization of novel words (e.g., de Carvalho, Babineau, Trueswell, Waxman, & Christophe, 2019; Hawthorne & Gerken, 2014; Massicotte-Laforge & Shi, 2015). Although there is no one-to-one correspondence between prosodic and syntactic boundaries, prosodic phrasing aligns with syntactic phrasing (Nespor & Vogel, 1986), such that whenever a prosodic phrase boundary occurs, it signals a syntactic phrase boundary (while the reverse is not true).
Phrasal prosody constrains syntactic analysis in toddlers
2017, CognitionThe acoustic salience of prosody trumps infants' acquired knowledge of language-specific prosodic patterns
2015, Journal of Memory and LanguageCitation Excerpt :This suggests that infants listening to an unfamiliar language may have trouble detecting violations of the typical correspondence between pauses, final lengthening, and pitch resets at clause boundaries. Similarly, English-acquiring infants who are listening to their native language are better at remembering a string of words that forms a prosodic constituent than the same string of words spoken with list prosody or straddling a prosodic boundary (Mandel, Jusczyk, & Kemler Nelson, 1994; Mandel, Kemler Nelson, & Jusczyk, 1996; Nazzi et al., 2000; Seidl, 2007; Soderstrom et al., 2003, 2005). Johnson and Seidl (2008), Seidl, (2007) found that both English- and Dutch-acquiring 6-month-olds recognized a familiarized prosodically-signaled clause at test when listening to their native language, but they also mention an unpublished experiment1 in which neither English-acquiring infants listening to Dutch nor Dutch-acquiring infants listening to English were able to recognize a non-native clause at test.
Biological Preconditions for Language Development
2015, International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences: Second EditionExploring the relationship between intonation and the lexicon: Evidence for lexicalised storage of intonation
2015, Speech CommunicationCitation Excerpt :Besides these two studies which come from an exemplar-theoretic angle, there is other work that indicates storage of sentential intonation. These studies are firstly situated in the domain of psycholinguistics, where several experiments demonstrate that the familiarity or frequency of prosodic parameters influence speech processing, perception and production (Braun et al., 2006; Braun and Johnson, 2011; Braun et al., 2011; Mandel et al., 1994; Van Lancker and Canter, 1981; Van Lancker et al., 1981). A second research area which provides evidence for lexicalised storage of intonation is the area of machine learning, where various studies showed that word identity helps in predicting pitch accent location (Brenier et al., 2006; Nenkova et al., 2007; Pan and Hirschberg, 2000; Pan and McKeown, 1999), and where instance-based learning of prosody outperforms other types of learning (Marsi et al., 2003).
The missing link in the embodiment of syntax: Prosody
2014, Brain and LanguageCitation Excerpt :For example, Johnson and Jusczyk (2001) show that 8-month old infants use stress patterns as a cue for segmenting the speech stream into words. Mandel, Jusczyk, and Nelson (1994) show that 2-months-old not only prefer to listen to coherent prosodic phrases, but their memory for words presented in such prosody is better than for words presented in a list intonation. Finally, there is evidence to suggest that 9-month-olds prefer passages where the prosodic break corresponds to the major syntactic break compared to passages where prosodic and syntactic breaks mismatch (e.g., Jusczyk et al., 1992).