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Perception of prosody: How toddlers harness intonation to guide early attention
Abstract
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.
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Three experiments were run to test whether newborns were able to discriminate different stress patterns in multisyllabic stressed Italian words that varied both in consonants and in number of syllables. A high-amplitude sucking procedure was adopted in which the experimental group heard 2 sets of stimuli alternating minute by minute, whereas the control group heard only a single set of stimuli. The results showed that stress patterns were discriminated in 2 disyllabic phonetically unvaried words (Experiment 1), in 2 trisyllabic consonant-varied words (Experiment 2), and in 2 sets of disyllabic words varied in consonants within and between words (Experiment 3). The alternation procedure proved to be suitable for examining newborns’ abilities of discrimination and categorization. It also lowered the participants’ rejection rate compared with the classic habituation procedure. The present results suggest that newborns are sensitive to words’ rhythm, as carried by stress patterns, and that this prosodic information is salient even in the presence of substantial consonant variation.
From the earliest months of life, infants prefer listening to and learn better from infant-directed speech (IDS) compared with adult-directed speech (ADS). Yet IDS differs within communities, across languages, and across cultures, both in form and in prevalence. This large-scale, multisite study used the diversity of bilingual infant experiences to explore the impact of different types of linguistic experience on infants’ IDS preference. As part of the multilab ManyBabies 1 project, we compared preference for North American English (NAE) IDS in lab-matched samples of 333 bilingual and 384 monolingual infants tested in 17 labs in seven countries. The tested infants were in two age groups: 6 to 9 months and 12 to 15 months. We found that bilingual and monolingual infants both preferred IDS to ADS, and the two groups did not differ in terms of the overall magnitude of this preference. However, among bilingual infants who were acquiring NAE as a native language, greater exposure to NAE was associated with a stronger IDS preference. These findings extend the previous finding from ManyBabies 1 that monolinguals learning NAE as a native language showed a stronger IDS preference than infants unexposed to NAE. Together, our findings indicate that IDS preference likely makes similar contributions to monolingual and bilingual development, and that infants are exquisitely sensitive to the nature and frequency of different types of language input in their early environments.
The perception of prosodic prominence is thought to be influenced by multiple competing factors. Three experiments tested the effects of phonological salience, discourse context and listener’s knowledge about the discourse on prosodic prominence judgements, using short adjective–noun phrases extracted from a corpus of spontaneous speech. These phrases had either a prominent L + H* 0 or a less prominent H* !H* pitch accent contour. The phrases were presented in a discourse context which either supported or did not support a contrastive interpretation of the adjective. Effects of the contrastive context to increase the perception of prominence only emerged for the phrases with the phonologically prominent L + H* 0 pitch accent sequence. Additionally, the magnitude of the contrast effect was correlated with the listener’s awareness of the discourse context, suggesting an ample interplay between linguistic context, pragmatic context, and phonology in prominence perception.
We investigated whether children at the ages of two and three years understand that a speaker's use of the definite article specifies a referent that is in common ground between speaker and listener. An experimenter and a child engaged in joint actions in which the experimenter chose one of three similar objects of the same category to perform an action. In subsequent interactions children were asked to get 'the X' or 'a X'. When children were instructed with the definite article they chose the shared object significantly more often than when they were instructed with the indefinite article in which case children's choice was at chance. The findings show that in their third year children use shared experiences to interpret the speaker's communicative intention underlying her referential choice. The results are discussed with respect to children's representation of linguistic categories and the role of joint action for establishing common ground.
In the current study we investigate whether 2- and 3-year-old German children use intonation productively to mark the informational status of referents. Using a story-telling task, we compared children’s and adults’ intonational realization via pitch accent (H*, L* and de-accentuation) of New, Given, and Contrastive referents. Both children and adults distinguished these elements with different pitch accents. Adults, however, de-accented Given information much more often than the children, especially the younger children. Since a failure to de-accent Given information may be a characteristic of caregiver speech, in a second study we tested how caregivers talking to their young children realize Given and New referents. In this discourse situation, the caregivers quite often failed to de-accent Given information, raising the possibility that the younger children were simply reproducing the pitch accents they had heard adults using.
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.
Four word learning studies with 24-mo-old children are reported. In Studies 1 and 2, an adult used a novel word to announce her intention to perform an action or to find an object. It was found that a knowledge of what action or object was impending, established through scripted events before the word's introduction, was not necessary for children to learn the words. Studies 3 and 4 focused on what word learning cues children might be using in these contexts. In Study 3, it was found that children learned a novel verb for an intentional and not an accidental action. In Study 4, it was found that children learned a novel noun for an object the adult was searching for, not ones she had rejected while searching. Because none of the best-known constraints on lexical acquisition could have helped them in these contexts, it was concluded that children were relying on social pragmatic cues to learn the new words. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Maximum likelihood or restricted maximum likelihood (REML) estimates of the
parameters in linear mixed-effects models can be determined using the lmer
function in the lme4 package for R. As for most model-fitting functions in R,
the model is described in an lmer call by a formula, in this case including
both fixed- and random-effects terms. The formula and data together determine a
numerical representation of the model from which the profiled deviance or the
profiled REML criterion can be evaluated as a function of some of the model
parameters. The appropriate criterion is optimized, using one of the
constrained optimization functions in R, to provide the parameter estimates. We
describe the structure of the model, the steps in evaluating the profiled
deviance or REML criterion, and the structure of classes or types that
represents such a model. Sufficient detail is included to allow specialization
of these structures by users who wish to write functions to fit specialized
linear mixed models, such as models incorporating pedigrees or smoothing
splines, that are not easily expressible in the formula language used by lmer.
We conducted a web-based experiment on German testing the perception of an element's prosodic prominence in relation to its status as a potential coreferent of an antecedent. Data were elicited by asking subjects to judge the probability of a coreference relation between a context noun (antecedent) and a target word (anaphor), whose lexically stressed syllable was manipulated as to the parameters F0 movement, duration and intensity. Results reveal a direct but inverse relationship between prominence and coreference judgements indicating that the likelihood of a coreference interpretation decreases with increasing prosodic prominence. F0 movement turned out to be the dominant cue for prominence – as the main trigger for the perception of pitch accents – with rises being perceived as more prominent than falls. In turn, lack of tonal movement probably led to perceived deaccentuation and thus favoured the evaluation of a target word as being coreferential with an antecedent. Duration was found to be a significant factor as well, while intensity did not prove to be relevant for the task given. Thus, the present study with its revised methodology adds new aspects to the debate of which parameters are crucial for prominence perception, directly linking it to the investigation of information structure.
Past research has shown that English learners begin segmenting words from speech by 7.5 months of age. However, more recent research has begun to show that, in some situations, infants may exhibit rudimentary segmentation capabilities at an earlier age. Here, we report on four perceptual experiments and a corpus analysis further investigating the initial emergence of segmentation capabilities. In Experiments 1 and 2, 6-month-olds were familiarized with passages containing target words located either utterance medially or at utterance edges. Only those infants familiarized with passages containing target words aligned with utterance edges exhibited evidence of segmentation. In Experiments 3 and 4, 6-month-olds recognized familiarized words when they were presented in a new acoustically distinct voice (male rather than female), but not when they were presented in a phonologically altered manner (missing the initial segment). Finally, we report corpus analyses examining how often different word types occur at utterance boundaries in different registers. Our findings suggest that edge-aligned words likely play a key role in infants' early segmentation attempts, and also converge with recent reports suggesting that 6-month-olds' have already started building a rudimentary lexicon.
There is increasing awareness of the large degree of crosslinguistic diversity involved in the structural realization of information packaging (or information structure). Whereas English and many Germanic languages primarily exploit intonation for informational purposes, in other languages, like Catalan, syntax plays the primary role in the realization of information packaging and intonation is reduced to a secondary role. In yet another group of languages the primary structural correlate is morphology. This paper provides a contrastive analysis of the structural properties of information packaging in a number of languages. It also contains a discussion of some basic issues concerning information packaging and identifies a set of information-packaging primitives that are applied to the crosslinguistic facts.
Two experiments were conducted to examine the on-line processing mechanisms used by young children to comprehend pronouns. The work focuses on their use of two highly relevant sources of information: (1) the gender and number features carried by English pronouns, and (2) the differing accessibility of discourse entities, as influenced by order-of-mention in a clause. Adults use both evidential sources, as early as 200 ms after the offset of the pronoun (Arnold, Eisenband, Brown-Schmidt, & Trueswell, 2000). We find that like adults, 3–5-year-old children use a pronoun's gender to guide their choice of a referent, and that they use it rapidly on-line. But unlike adults, they show little or no signs of a first-mentioned bias, either off-line or on-line. This is consistent with a tendency for children to initially recruit reliable sources of constraint for language comprehension – in this case, the gender of the pronoun.
Adopting an eyetracking paradigm, we investigated the role of H*L, L*HL, L*H, H*LH, and deaccentuation at the intonational phrase-final position in online processing of information status in British English in natural speech. The role of H*L, L*H and deaccentuation was also examined in diphonesynthetic speech. It was found that H*L and L*HL create a strong bias towards newness, whereas L*H, like deaccentuation, creates a strong bias towards givenness. In synthetic speech, the same effect was found for H*L, L*H and deaccentuation, but it was delayed. The delay may not be caused entirely by the difference in the segmental quality between synthetic and natural speech. The pitch accent H*LH, however, appears to bias participants' interpretation to the target word, independent of its information status. This finding was explained in the light of the effect of durational information at the segmental level on word recognition.
Linear mixed-effects models (LMEMs) have become increasingly prominent in psycholinguistics and related areas. However, many researchers do not seem to appreciate how random effects structures affect the generalizability of an analysis. Here, we argue that researchers using LMEMs for confirmatory hypothesis testing should minimally adhere to the standards that have been in place for many decades. Through theoretical arguments and Monte Carlo simulation, we show that LMEMs generalize best when they include the maximal random effects structure justified by the design. The generalization performance of LMEMs including data-driven random effects structures strongly depends upon modeling criteria and sample size, yielding reasonable results on moderately-sized samples when conservative criteria are used, but with little or no power advantage over maximal models. Finally, random-intercepts-only LMEMs used on within-subjects and/or within-items data from populations where subjects and/or items vary in their sensitivity to experimental manipulations always generalize worse than separate F1 and F2 tests, and in many cases, even worse than F1 alone. Maximal LMEMs should be the ‘gold standard’ for confirmatory hypothesis testing in psycholinguistics and beyond.
ABSTRACT Both off-line and on-line comprehension studies suggest not only toddlers and preschoolers, but also older school-age children have trouble interpreting contrast-marking pitch prominence. To test whether children achieve adult-like proficiency in processing contrast-marking prosody during school years, an eye-tracking experiment examined the effect of accent on referential resolution in six- to eleven-year-old children and adults. In all age groups, a prominent accent facilitated the detection of a target in contrastive discourse sequences (pink cat→green cat), whereas it led to a garden path in non-contrastive sequences (pink rabbit→green monkey: the initial fixations were on rabbits). While the data indicate that children as young as age six immediately interpret contrastive accent, even the oldest child group showed delayed fixations compared to adults. We argue that the children's slower recovery from the garden path reflects the gradual development in cognitive flexibility that matures independently of general oculomotor control.
Accentuation results in faster recognition of words expressing new (focal) information. To find out whether accentuation speeds up the comprehension of words expressing given information as well, the presence or absence of accents was varied independently for these categories in three experiments. Degree of Givenness was varied across experiments. Listeners verified spoken descriptions of pictures. Accentuation was found to interact with the Given/New variable: Given information was verified faster when the word expressing it was unaccented, New information was verified faster when the word expressing it was accented. These findings suggest that listeners do not simply give more attention to accented words, but rather process accented and unaccented words in different ways. It is hypothesized that the presence of an accent leads the listener to give primary attention to the acoustic/phonetic properties of the word and to construct an interpretation from the bottom up, and that the absence of an accent on a word leads him to map it onto the limited set of discourse entities which are currently activated, with less attention for the acoustic/phonetic properties.
Examined the prosodic characteristics of "motherese" in the speech of 24 German mothers to their newborns. Each S was recorded in 3 observational conditions, while addressing (1) her 3–5 day old baby (MB speech), (2) the absent infant as if present (simulated MB speech), and (3) the adult interviewer (MA speech). For each S, 2-min speech samples from each condition were acoustically analyzed. It was found that in MB speech, Ss spoke with higher pitch, wider pitch excursions, longer pauses, shorter utterances, and more prosodic repetition than in MA speech. 77% of the utterances in the MB speech sample conformed to a limited set of prosodic patterns that occurred only rarely in adult-directed speech (i.e., they consisted of characteristic expanded intonation contours, or they were whispered). The prosody of mothers' speech is discussed in terms of its immediate influence within the context of mother–infant interaction, as well as its potential long-range contribution to perceptual, social, and linguistic development. The exaggerated, rhythmic vocalizations of mothers' speech to newborns may serve to regulate infant attention and responsiveness and later contribute to prelinguistic skills. (36 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Previous research has documented infants' ability to follow adults' line-of-regard and pointing gestures by 9–22 mo of age, but it has not been clear whether infants appreciate that such cues are a priviledged source of information about word reference. Study 1 demonstrated that this is understood by at least 19–20 mo: Infants used referential cues to guide a new word–object mapping even though this required that they ignore competition from temporal contiguity. In Study 2, the effects observed in Study 1 were not obtained with actions that served to enhance the salience of an object nonreferentially (e.g., manipulating without looking), suggesting that infants appreciate that actions that accompany labeling are not necessarily referential. Taken together, these indicate that language learning is grounded in a relatively rich understanding of cues to reference, at least from late infancy on. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The utterances of 6 mothers to their 2-, 4-, and 6-mo-old infants were analyzed to determine the type of grammatical sentence, the pitch contour of the utterance, and whether the infant was gazing and smiling at the mother at the time of her utterance. Two contours were context specific for all mothers: Rising contours were used when the infant was not visually attending and the mother "wanted" eye contact; sinusoidal and bell-shaped contours were used when the infant was gazing and smiling at the mother and she wanted to maintain the infant's positive affect and gaze. Different mothers used different contours to elicit smiling when the infant was gazing but not smiling at her. Mothers also used specific pitch contours for specific types of sentences. Yes–no questions had rise contours, and "wh" questions and commands generally had fall contours. Declarative sentences had sinusoidal–bell contours rather than the fall contours. (31 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Investigated the suggestion that young infants show a preference for familiar stimuli that is supplanted by a preference for novel stimuli as they get older and the act of recognition becomes commonplace. In Study 1, 84 Ss (3.5, 4.5, and 6.5 mo old) were tested for visual recognition memory of shapes, using the paired comparison procedure. The 3.5-mo-olds showed a strong preference for the familiar, whereas the older Ss preferred the novel stimulus. In Study 2 with 72 3.5- and 6.5-mo-old Ss, these shifts were found to depend more on familiarization time than on age. Ss of both ages showed a preference for the familiar stimulus after limited exposure to it but shifted to a preference for the novel stimulus after more extended exposure. It is concluded that regardless of age, infants prefer to look at that which is familiar as they begin to process a stimulus; once processing becomes more advanced, their preference shifts to the novel. Findings are therefore contrary to the developmental view investigated. (32 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Studied the auditory preferences of 10 Down's syndrome (DS; mean CA 12.4 mo; mean MA 9.3 mo) and 10 nonhandicapped (NH; mean CA 9.3 mo; mean MA 9.6 mo) infants at the developmental ages of around 9 and 18 mo. An apparatus that allows infants to choose to listen to 1 of a pair of auditory stimuli and that records their responses was used. At both ages, Ss had the choice of listening first to either a children's rhyme or a repetitive tone and then to either the mother talking to her own child (baby talk) or the mother talking to an adult. At both ages, both groups of Ss significantly preferred to listen to the children's rhyme and to the baby talk. At 9 mo, both groups listened significantly more to nursery rhymes than to spoken stimuli; by 18 mo, NH Ss showed a significant increase in listening to baby talk, which they then listened to longer than to rhymes. DS Ss showed a significant decrease in listening to baby talk at this age and still listened longer to rhymes. (12 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Children’s ability to interpret color adjective noun phrases (e.g., red butterfly) as contrastive was examined in an eyetracking study with 6-year-old Russian children. Pitch accent placement (on the adjective red, or on the noun butterfly) was compared within a visual context containing two red referents (a butterfly and a fox) when only one of them had a contrast member (a purple butterfly) or when both had a contrast member (a purple butterfly and a grey fox). Contrastiveness was enhanced by the Russian-specific ‘split constituent’ construction (e.g., Red put butterfly…) in which a contrastive interpretation of the color term requires pitch accent on the adjective, with the NonSplit sentences serving as control. Regardless of the experimental manipulations, children had to wait until hearing the noun (butterfly) to identify the referent, even in splits. This occurred even under conditions for which the prosody and the visual context allow adult listeners to infer the relevant contrast set and anticipate the referent prior to hearing the noun (accent on the adjective in 1-Contrast scenes). Pitch accent on the adjective did facilitate children’s referential processing, but only for the NonSplit constituents. Moreover, visual contexts that encouraged the correct contrast set (1-Contrast) only facilitated referential processing after hearing the noun, even in splits. Further analyses showed that children can anticipate the reference like adults but only when the contrast set is made salient by the preceding supportive discourse, that is, when the inference about the intended contrast set is provided by the preceding utterance.
Intentions in Communication brings together major theorists from artificial intelligence and computer science, linguistics, philosophy, and psychology whose work develops the foundations for an account of the role of intentions in a comprehensive theory of communication. It demonstrates, for the first time, the emerging cooperation among disciplines concerned with the fundamental role of intention in communication. The fourteen contributions in this book address central questions about the nature of intention as it is understood in theories of communication, the crucial role of intention recognition in understanding utterances, the use of principles of rational interaction in interpreting speech acts, the contribution of intonation contours to intention recognition, and the need for more general models of intention that support a view of dialogue as a collaborative activity.
Contributors
Michael E. Bratman, Philip R. Cohen, Hector J. Levesque, Martha E. Pollack, Henry Kautz, Andrew J. I. Jones, C. Raymond Perrault, Daniel Vanderveken, Janet Pierrehumbert, Julia Hirschberg, Richmond H. Thomason, Diane J Litman, James F. Allen, John R. Searle, Barbara J. Grosz, Candace L. Sidner, Herbert H. Clark and Deanna Wilkes-Gibbs. The book also includes commentaries by James F. Allen, W. A Woods, Jerry Morgan, Jerrold M. Sadock Jerry R. Hobbs, and Kent Bach.
Intentions in Communication is included in the System Development Foundation Benchmark Series.
Bradford Books imprint
The absence of intonational prominence on a referring expression ( deaccentuation) is commonly explained as a consequence of the GIVENness of the discourse entity referred to - the fact that it represents old information in the discourse. However, speakers sometimes use accented expressions to refer to such GIVEN entities, so that GIVENness is not a sufficient explanation for deaccentuation. It has also been suggested that speakers tend to express GIVEN entities as grammatical subjects and to mention them early in the utterance. The present work investigates the contributions of grammatical role and surface position to the occurrence of deaccentuation in English. An experiment is reported in which speakers produced descriptions of visual materials, where the content of the materials was manipulated so that successive descriptions contained coreferential expressions, and grammatical role and surface position varied systematically. The results indicate that persistence of grammatical role and surface position from one utterance to the next both contribute to deaccentuation. Some implications for the way in which listeners may link referring expressions to entities which are already available from the context are discussed.
This chapter describes a system for the transcription of Dutch intonation, based on the autosegmental description by Gussenhoven. It describes intonational Phrase (IP) boundaries, Utterance boundaries, IP-final, and IP_initial tones, plus pitch accents, following the Pierrehumbert model. It uses three initial boundary tones, %L, %H, and %HL; three final boundary conditions, L%, H%, and % (no tone); five pitch accents H*, L*, H*L, L*H, and H*!H; plus two modifications, Delay (L*-prefix) and downstep (!H). The system has a larger coverage than the IPO grammar, is more transparent than the earlier autosegmental description, while also including the distinction between low rise (L*H H%) and high rise (H*H%), absent from the earlier description. © Editorial matter and organization Sun-Ah Jun 2005. All rights reserved.
The perception of prosodic prominence in spontaneous speech is investigated through an online task of prosody transcription using untrained listeners. Promi-nence is indexed through a probabilistic prominence score assigned to each word based on the proportion of transcribers who perceived the word as prominent. Correlation and regression analyses between perceived prominence, acoustic measures and measures of a word's information status are conducted to test three hypotheses: (i) prominence perception is signal-driven, influenced by acoustic fac-tors reflecting speakers' productions; (ii) perception is expectation-driven, influ-enced by the listener's prior experience of word frequency and repetition; (iii) any observed influence of word frequency on perceived prominence is mediated through the acoustic signal. Results show correlates of perceived prominence in acoustic measures, in word log-frequency and in the repetition index of a word, consistent with both signal-driven and expectation-driven hypotheses of prominence percep-tion. But the acoustic correlates of perceived prominence differ somewhat from the correlates of word frequency, suggesting an independent effect of frequency on prominence perception. A speech processing account is offered as a model of s ignal-driven and expectation-driven effects on prominence perception, where prominence ratings are a function of the ease of lexical processing, as measured through the activation levels of lexical and sub-lexical units.
Many children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are delayed in learning language. The mechanisms underlying these delays are not well understood but may involve differences in how children process language. In the current experiment, we compared how 3- to 4-year-old children with ASD (n = 58) and 2- to 3-year-old children who are typically developing (TD, n = 44) use phonological information to incrementally process speech. Children saw pictures of objects displayed on a screen and heard sentences labeling one of the objects (e.g., Find the ball). For some sentences, the determiner the contained coarticulatory information about the onset of the target word. For other sentences, the determiner the did not contain any coarticulatory information. Children were faster to fixate the target object for sentences with vs. without coarticulation. This effect of coarticulation was the same for children with ASD compared to their TD peers. When controlling for group differences in receptive language ability, the effect of coarticulation was stronger for children with ASD compared to their TD peers. These results suggest that phonological processing is an area of relative strength for children with ASD.
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.
Children use the presence of familiar objects with known names to identify the correct referents of novel words. In natural environments, objects vary widely in salience. The presence of familiar objects may sometimes hinder rather than help word learning. To test this hypothesis, 3-year-olds (N = 36) were shown novel objects paired with familiar objects that varied in their visual salience. When the novel objects were labeled, children were slower and less accurate at fixating them in the presence of highly salient familiar objects than in the presence of less salient familiar objects. They were also less successful in retaining these word-referent pairings. While familiar objects may facilitate novel word learning in ambiguous situations, the properties of familiar objects matter.
Many recent psycholinguistic studies have used empirical logit analysis as a substitute for mixed-effects logistic regression. In this paper, we describe the differences between empirical logit analysis and mixed-effects logistic regression and highlight three interacting sources of bias in empirical logit analysis. We then report on two sets of simulations comparing logistic regression and empirical logit analysis. We show that relative to logistic regression, empirical logit analysis generally yields biased parameter estimates when proportions are close to 0 or 1, especially when the number of observations underlying a proportion is very low. We also show that, in some circumstances, this bias can create spurious interactions, leading to unacceptable Type I error rates. While these two models may provide similar answers to some questions, we encourage readers to interpret empirical logit parameters cautiously.
Can preschoolers make pragmatic inferences based on the intonation of an utterance? Previous work has found that young children appear to ignore intonational meanings and come to understand contrastive intonation contours only after age six. We show that four-year-olds succeed in interpreting an English utterance, such as "It LOOKS like a zebra", to derive a conversational implicature, namely [but it isn't one], as long as they can access a semantically stronger alternative, in this case "It's a zebra". We propose that children arrive at the implicature by comparing such contextually provided alternatives. Contextually leveraged inferences generalize across speakers and contexts, and thus drive the acquisition of intonational meanings. Our findings show that four-year-olds and adults are able to bootstrap their interpretation of the contrast-marking intonation by taking into account alternative utterances produced in the same context.
In this chapter, we provide a developmental outline of the emergence of referential skills during early childhood. We first briefly outline the major theoretical frameworks of reference as based on the adult literature and also introduce the growing body of developmental work. In two subsequent sections, we focus on typically developing children’s comprehension and production skills, respectively. Next, we look to clinical populations, summarising research on referential skills in children with autism spectrum disorders. We conclude by outlining a developmental sketch of children’s referential skills, considering some of the current debates within the development of reference.
This second edition presents a completely revised overview of research on intonational phonology since the 1970s, including new material on research developments since the mid 1990s. It contains a new section discussing the research on the alignment of pitch features that has developed since the first edition was published, a substantially rewritten section on ToBI transcription that takes account of the application of ToBI principles to other languages, and new sections on the phonetic research on accent and focus. The substantive chapters on the analysis and transcription of pitch contours, pitch range, sentence stress and prosodic structure have been reorganised and updated. In addition, there is an associated website with sound files of the example sentences discussed in the book. This well-known study will continue to appeal to researchers and graduate students who work on any aspect of intonation.
Growth Curve Analysis and Visualization Using R provides a practical, easy-to-understand guide to carrying out multilevel regression/growth curve analysis (GCA) of time course or longitudinal data in the behavioral sciences, particularly cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, and psychology. With a minimum of statistical theory and technical jargon, the author focuses on the concrete issue of applying GCA to behavioral science data and individual differences.
http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9781466584327
http://www.danmirman.org/gca
The ToBI transcription system for English intonation draws a distinction between two kinds of pitch accents involving local F0 maxima, namely H* and L+H*. In the L+H*, the rise to the F0 maximum begins with an actual phonological target (L), but in the H* the beginning of the rise (here “F0 min”) supposedly has no phonological status and its phonetic properties are determined by various contextual factors. The three experiments reported here provide evidence against this latter claim. The experiments are based on the phonetic properties of the medial F0 min in H* H* sequences on English given name+surname phrases (e.g., Norman Elson). In Experiment 1, we show that the F0 min is reliably aligned with the beginning of the accented syllable of the surname, thus correlating with the word boundary distinction in minimal pairs like Norman Elson/Norma Nelson. In Experiment 2, we show that experimentally modifying the alignment of the F0 min in such segmentally ambiguous phrases affects listeners’ judgment of which name they are hearing. In Experiment 3, we show that the F0 level of the F0 min and of the second H* accent is affected by the number of syllables intervening between the two accented syllables, in a way that is not predicted by Pierrehumbert's “sagging transition” model, which is central to the distinction between H* and L+H*. We therefore argue that in both H* and L+H* there are distinct L and H targets, and that the two should be regarded as belonging to a single accent category. This analysis makes the description of English intonation more theoretically consistent with that of various other European languages. The analysis also helps explain ToBI transcribers’ demonstrated difficulty in making the distinction between H* and L+H* reliably.
Two studies were conducted to examine infants’ ability to discern intentions from lexical and prosodic cues. Two groups of 14–18-month-olds participated in these studies. In both studies, infants watched an adult perform a sequence of two-step actions on novel toys that produced an end-result. In the first study actions were marked intentionally with both lexical and prosodic cues. In the second study, the lexical markers of intention were presented in Greek, thus providing infants with prosodic but not lexical cues. In both studies, infants reproduced more intentional than accidental actions, suggesting that infants can infer intentions from prosodic cues.
Traditionally, it has been assumed that emphasis is used to signal that information in a conversation is new, focused, or important. In this chapter, evidence from three sets of experiments suggests that emphasis is the product of a number of different factors that can affect the acoustic prominence of a word in different ways. I present evidence that (1) emphasis can vary continuously, not categorically; (2) differing factors like difficulty of production and informational importance have different effects on how emphasis is acoustically realized; and (3) listeners do not treat all acoustic correlates of emphasis equally when processing speech, suggesting that they are sensitive to the fact that emphasis is the product of multiple sources. These findings suggest that rather than being a unitary linguistic or psychological construct, emphasis is the product of an array of different cognitive and linguistic factors.
The comprehension of nine intonational contrasts involving different intonation-groupings, different nucleus placements, and different tones, was examined in 20 ten-year-old children and 20 adults. Fewer ten-year-olds than adults answered correctly on almost all tasks. Initial hypotheses concerning the order of acquisition among the three systems (grouping, nucleus placement, and tone) were in general not confirmed. But the distinction between context-wide and context-limited tonal meanings was predictive of acquisition; and a similar distinction based on local meanings rather than on the intonation patterns themselves is likely to apply to groupings and nucleus placements.
Transitivity, mood and theme. Part I of this paper (sections 1–3) was an attempt to sketch some of the principal syntactic options, having the clause as point of origin, that are available to the speaker of English for the representation of processes and relations, and of objects, persons &c. as participants in them. The term ‘transitivity’ was used as a general label for this area of grammatical selection. Part II (sections 4–7) is concerned with another range of grammatical options, also associated with the clause, for which ‘theme’ is being used as the cover term.
Over the last 15 years, since Halliday drew the attention of scholars in the West to the Prague School division of information within an information unit into given or new information, a considerable literature has developed. This literature has now largely obscured the phenomenon to which Halliday [1967 a] sought to draw attention. The aim of this contribution is to reassert Halliday’s basic distinction, to outline briefly how it relates to the plethora of other distinctions which have since been made in the literature, and to demonstrate from a limited corpus of data that Halliday’s simple dichotomous distinctions must be invoked to account for the range of intonational realisation in that data.
Two kinds of principles governing the timing or alignment of tonal targets have been proposed in modern theories of intonational phonology: first, targets may align with respect to the segmental string, and second, targets may align with respect to one another. We shed light on these two proposals by presenting an analysis of data from Ladd and Schepman (J. Phonetics 31 (2003) 81), which had found effects of syllable boundary location on the alignment of the fundamental frequency (F0) minimum at the beginning of a rising (L+H Ã) pitch accent in English. We investigated the effects of syllable boundary placement on the alignment of the accentual 1 maximum (H) relative to the F0 minimum (L) and relative to the onset of the stressed vowel (V). The syllable boundary manipulation significantly affects the duration of the interval between L and H, but not the duration of the interval between V and H. This suggests that the two tones in a bitonal L+H Ã pitch accent are aligned with respect to the segmental string, rather than each other. This contributes to a growing body of evidence that the fixed tonal alignment entailed in the original definition of bitonal pitch accents is at odds with phonetic facts.
This paper gives an overview of recent studies on the use of phonological cues (accent placement and choice of accent type)
to mark focus in Dutch-speaking children aged between 1;9 and 8;10. It is argued that learning to use phonological cues to
mark focus is a gradual process. In the light of the findings in these studies, a first proposal is put forward on the developmental
path to adult-like phonological focus-marking in Dutch.
KeywordsFocus-Phonology-Intonation-First language acquisition-Dutch