Prosodische Wahrnehmung im frühen Spracherwerb

 

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Zusammenfassung

Prosodische Merkmale im Input nehmen eine bedeutende Rolle für den schnellen Spracherwerb, den Kinder i. Allg. ohne große Mühen in ihren ersten Lebensjahren vollziehen, ein. So sind Kinder bereits von Geburt an sensitiv für prosodische Veränderungen im Sprachsignal. Im Verlauf des ersten Lebensjahres entwickeln sich rezeptive prosodische Fähigkeiten weiter und lassen dabei eine frühe einzelsprachspezifische Verarbeitung erkennen. Prosodische und syntaktische Einheiten korrelieren häufig miteinander. Kinder nutzen ihre prosodischen Wahrnehmungsfähigkeiten und leiten – anhand prosodischer Hinweise im Input – Informationen über die Segmentierung des kontinuierlichen Sprachstroms in Wörter, Phrasen und Sätze ab. Der Fokus der Sprachwahrnehmung im ersten Lebensjahr liegt auf der Verarbeitung prosodischer Merkmale und ermöglicht einen effizienten Einstieg in den Spracherwerb. Zukünftige Studien müssen klären, inwiefern frühe prosodische Verarbeitungsfähigkeiten als Indizien für den Verlauf des späteren Spracherwerbs und das Auftreten von Spracherwerbsstörungen genutzt werden können.

Abstract

Prosody plays an important role in early language acquisition that in most children proceeds rapidly and easily. From birth on infants are able to perceive prosodic information in the speech signal. During the course of the first year of life prosodic perception abilities continue to develop. Cross-linguistic studies have shown that this development is already influenced by the native language. As prosodic and syntactic units occur often in correlation, prosodic cues in the continuous speech signal might help infants to derive information on how to segment their native language into syntactically relevant units. Indeed, infants use their prosodic perception and are able to detect word, phrase and clause boundaries using prosodic cues from the speech signal. Thus, during the first year of life when perceiving speech the processing of prosodic cues is focussed and allows for an efficient access to language acquisition. Future studies need to determine whether early prosodic perception abilities can provide markers for later language development and predict language impairment.

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