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Children’ use of intonation in reference and the role of input
Abstract
Studies on children's use of intonation in reference are few in number but are diverse in terms of theoretical frameworks and intonational parameters. In the current review, I present a re-analysis of the referents in each study, using a three-dimension approach (i.e. referential givenness-newness, relational givenness-newness, contrast), discuss the use of intonation at two levels (phonetic, phonological), and compare findings from different studies within a single framework. The patterns stemming from these studies may be limited in generalisability but can serve as initial hypotheses for future work. Furthermore, I examine the role of input as available in infant direct speech in the acquisition of intonational encoding of referents. In addition, I discuss how future research can advance our knowledge.
... Other ways that referents are typically analyzed in the literature are as "accessible" and "contrastive" (Chen, 2015). A referent is accessible if it has been previously activated in the discourse or if the referent is inferable from a previously mentioned referent. ...
... A referent is accessible if it has been previously activated in the discourse or if the referent is inferable from a previously mentioned referent. A referent may be CONTRASTIVE when it is uttered in contrast to a limited set of alternatives, and in this case, it can be either referentially NEW or GIVEN (Chafe, 1976;Chen, 2015;Halliday, 1967). For this study, we analyze child productions of NEW and GIVEN discourse referents (i.e., referential givenness-newness) as well as referents that are uttered as corrections, similar to the aforementioned definition of contrast. ...
... F 0 peak was found to be the primary discriminating factor between the two, with duration and intensity exhibiting smaller differences. The acoustic correlates most commonly analyzed for the information status of referents and pitch accent structure include duration, F 0 , and intensity (Chen, 2012(Chen, , 2015. ...
Our motivation was to examine how toddler (2;6) and adult speakers of American English prosodically realize information status categories. The aims were three-fold: 1) to analyze how adults phonologically make information status distinctions; 2) to examine how these same categories are signaled in toddlers’ spontaneous speech; and 3) to analyze the three primary acoustic correlates of prosody (F 0 , intensity, and duration). During a spontaneous speech task designed as an interactive game, a set of target nouns was elicited as one of three types ( new, given, corrective ). Results show that toddlers primarily used H* across information status categories, with secondary preferences for deaccenting given information and for using L+H* for corrective information. Only duration distinguished information status, and duration, average pitch, and intensity differentiated pitch accent types for both adults and children. Discussion includes how pitch accent selection and input play a role in guiding prosodic realizations of information status.
... Against a background of substantial methodological variability, cross-linguistic differences observed between studies are hard to isolate. Below we will review past production studies on children learning West-Germanic languages by taking three dimensions of information structure into account; focus or relational givenness-newness, referential givenness-newness and contrast, following Chen (2015). We will also mention some of these studies in the background sections of Chapters 4 -7, but the summaries included in those chapters will only include work particularly relevant for the study in question (e.g. ...
... what happens?), thus the kind of 'newness' referred to may be considered more of a referential than a relational kind (e.g. Gundel & Fretheim, 2004;Chen, 2015). Relevant for our own work, these two studies suggest that children as young as three can mark contrastive information with prosodic emphasis, but questions remain as to whether children can also do this when no explicit contrast exists, not to mention whether the prosodic manipulations produced by children mirror those of adults, as adult controls were not included in these two studies. ...
... Hanssen et al., 2008;Baumann et al., 2007;Myrberg, 2013, for studies on focus size effects in adults). Finally, eliciting both contrastive and non-contrastive focus allowed for us to test whether the differential marking of narrow versus contrastive focus suggested by previous work could also be observed when contrastive and non-contrastive focus was elicited within the same experiment (see Chen, 2011aChen, , 2015, for discussions). Our research questions are presented below. ...
... On-line reference comprehension studies show that adults who hear an unaccented noun phrase are biased to look to a previously mentioned (or given) referent, but they vary in whether accented noun phrases bias looks to new referents and to what extent this depends on the type of pitch accent used (Arnold, 2008;Chen et al., 2007;Dahan et al., 2002;Watson et al., 2008). In addition to new-given (and accessible), another way that referents have been analyzed is as contrastive (Chen, 2015). A referent may be contrastive when it is uttered in contrast to a limited set of alternatives, and in this case, it may be either referentially new or given (or accessible; Chafe, 1976;Chen, 2015;Halliday, 1967). ...
... In addition to new-given (and accessible), another way that referents have been analyzed is as contrastive (Chen, 2015). A referent may be contrastive when it is uttered in contrast to a limited set of alternatives, and in this case, it may be either referentially new or given (or accessible; Chafe, 1976;Chen, 2015;Halliday, 1967). Certain types of accentuation are used to evoke different pragmatic interpretations. ...
Young infants are born with language-specific preferences, particularly with respect to prosody (i.e., melody and rhythm). Previous work has shown that by 18-months, toddlers are guided by intonation and information status during an on-line reference resolution task (Thorson and Morgan, 14). This study isolated the role of fundamental frequency (f0) during early attentional processing, showing that a bitonal f0 movement increases looking time to a target over a monotonal movement (and both show increased looking versus no pitch movements). The motivation for the current study is to examine the ability to perceive and utilize specific intonational patterns at earlier stages in speech and language development. The study asks whether typically developing 14-month-old toddlers are able to employ different intonational contours in order to attend to an object with unique information statuses (e.g., new, given). Methods include monitoring eye movements in response to varying pitch patterns and analyzing variables such as total fixation time to a target and time of first fixation. We hypothesize that at this early stage, toddlers will exploit the prosodic system to fixate on the discourse salient target. Critically, this work is a precursor to analyzing the early perception of prosody in young children with autism spectrum disorders.
... On the other hand, the use of phonetic means as an alternative to phonological means, especially the use of duration, is not adult-like even at the age of eight (A. Chen, 2009, 2015. However, this developmental path to adult-like prosodic focus-marking may not be generalisable to children acquiring a language that differs from West Germanic languages. ...
... These findings imply that children's phonetic use of pitch in West Germanic languages may be related to the expression of contrast (A. Chen, 2015). However, Mandarin-speaking children at a similar age can vary pitch-max and pitch-min of certain lexical tones for focus-marking purposes even when the focused words do not carry contrast. ...
This study investigates how children acquire prosodic focus-marking in Mandarin Chinese. Using a picture-matching game, we elicited spontaneous production of sentences in various focus conditions from children aged four to eleven. We found that Mandarin Chinese-speaking children use some pitch-related cues in some tones and duration in all tones in an adult-like way to distinguish focus from non-focus at the age of four to five. Their use of pitch-related cues is not yet fully adult-like in certain tones at the age of eleven. Further, they are adult-like in the use of duration in distinguishing narrow focus from broad focus at four or five but in not using pitch-related cues for this purpose at seven or eight. The later acquisition of pitch-related cues may be related to the use of pitch for lexical purposes, and the differences in the use of pitch in different tones can be explained by differences in how easy it is to vary pitch-related parameters without changing tonal identity.
... Previous studies on children's production of prosody in reference have shown that children of different languages develop in stages the ability to prosodically attune the referential expression to accessibility status shifts from given/accessible to new/inaccessible [5]. For example, English-speaking 3-and 4-year-olds can produce a larger pitch span to distinguish referents that differ in both contrastiveness and referential givenness-newness, but cannot use durational cues like adults [6][7][8]. ...
This study examined how toddler looking to a discourse referent is mediated by the information status of the referent and the pitch contour of the referring expression. Eighteen-month-olds saw a short discourse of three sets of images with the proportion of looking time to a target analyzed during the final image. At test, the information status of the referent was either new or given and the referring expression was presented with one of three pitch contours (flat f0, monotonal (~H*), or bitonal (~L+H*)). In Experiment 1, toddlers looked reliably longer to a target referent when it was either new to the discourse or carried a non-flat pitch contour. In Experiment 2, the referring expression was removed to observe effects of information status alone on looking to a target referent. Toddlers looked significantly longer to a target when it was new versus given. More fine-grained time course analyses of eye movements revealed differences in the speed and duration of fixation to a target. Overall, the experiments show that discourse reference in toddlers is mediated by the presence of newness and pitch contours, even in the case of given information.
This study investigates the realization of the two most common word-level stress patterns in Hebrew, final and penultimate, at utterance-final position. Twenty-six disyllabic words that form minimal pairs, which differ only in their stress pattern, were embedded in 52 sentences. The mean values of three acoustic parameters—duration, F0, and intensity—were measured for vowels of the target words. Findings show that duration is significantly longer at stressed vowels, similar to previous findings on words at utterance-mid position. Lower intensity is assigned to the utterance-final vowels regardless of the stress pattern, but the degree of lowering does depend on the stress pattern. Finally, lower F0 values are found in the utterance-final vowels, but the degree of lowering is similar to both stress patterns. We conclude that duration is the main cue at the prosodic word level, while F0 is used by Hebrew speakers to cue higher prosodic units.
Central to the debate on the production-comprehension link in prosodic development is the acquisition of focus-to-prosody mapping. To elucidate the nature of the production-comprehension link and shed first light on individual differences in the prosodic domain, the present study investigated developmental changes in production and comprehension of the focus-to-prosody mapping in Dutch-speaking children (age range: 4;8 ~ 7;5, N = 71) longitudinally. It was found that children’s comprehension is predictive of their production only if their comprehension is already adult-like but their production isn’t. Notably, individual differences in the production-comprehension link change with both sentence-position and age, challenging the assertion in the literature that individual differences are stable across development and domains in first language acquisition.
Languages differ in both the use of prosody in focus marking and prosodic systems. In the light of recent studies of acquisition of prosodic focus marking in typologically different languages, we argue that typological differences have direct influences on acquisition of prosodic focus marking. More specifically, differences in reliance on phonetic uses of prosody and transparency of how prosody is used phonologically to encode focus can lead to cross-linguistic differences in rate of acquisition. Differences in whether the prosodic means involved are also used for lexical purposes and in interface between prosody and word order can trigger cross-linguistic differences in route of acquisition.
We analysed intonation contours of two-word utterances from three monolingual Dutch children aged between 1;4 and 2;1 in the autosegmental-metrical framework. Our data show that children have mastered the inventory of the boundary tones and nuclear pitch accent types (except for L*HL and L*!HL) at the 160-word level, and the set of non-downstepped pre-nuclear pitch accents (except for L*) at the 230-word level, contra previous claims on the mastery of adult-like intonation contours before or at the onset of first words. Further, there is evidence that intonational development is correlated with an increase in vocabulary size. Moreover, we found that children show a preference for falling contours, as predicted on the basis of universal production mechanisms. In addition, the utterances are mostly spoken with both words accented independent of semantic relations expressed and information status of each word across developmental stages, contra prior work. Our study suggests a number of topics for further research.
Two studies investigated adults' use of prosodic emphasis to mark focused words in speech to infants and adults. In Experiment 1,18 mothers told a story to a 14-month-old infant and to an adult, using a picture book in which 6 target items were the focus of attention. Prosodic emphasis was measured both acoustically and subjectively. In speech to infants, mothers consistently positioned focused words on exaggerated pitch peaks in utterance-final position, whereas in speech to adults prosodic emphasis was more variable. In Experiment 2, 12 women taught another adult an assembly procedure involving familiar and novel terminology. In both studies, stressed words in adult-directed speech rarely coincided with pitch peaks. However, in infant-directed speech, mothers regularly used pitch prominence to convey primary stress. The use of exaggerated pitch peaks at the ends of utterances to mark focused words may facilitate speech processing for the infant.