In many languages, declaratives and interrogatives differ in word order properties, and in syntactic organization more broadly. Thus, in order to learn the distinct syntactic properties of the two sentence types, learners must first be able to distinguish them using non-syntactic information. Prosodic information is often assumed to be a useful basis for this type of discrimination, although no systematic studies of the prosodic cues available to infants have been reported. Analysis of maternal speech in three Standard American English-speaking mother-infant dyads found that polar interrogatives differed from declaratives on the patterning of pitch and duration on the final two syllables, but wh-questions did not. Thus, while prosody is unlikely to aid discrimination of declaratives from wh-questions, infant-directed speech provides prosodic information that infants could use to distinguish declaratives and polar interrogatives. We discuss how learners could leverage this information to identify all question forms, in the context of syntax acquisition.
Cross-linguistically, statements and questions broadly differ in syntactic organization. To learn the syntactic properties of each sentence type, learners might first rely on non-syntactic information. This paper analyzed prosodic differences between infant-directed wh-questions and statements to determine what kinds of cues might be available. We predicted there would be a significant difference depending on the first words that appear in wh-questions (e.g., two closed-class words; meaning words from a category that rarely changes) compared to the variety of first words found in statements. We measured F0, duration, and intensity of the first two words in statements and wh-questions in naturalistic speech from 13 mother-child dyads in the Brent corpus of the CHILDES database. Results found larger differences between sentence-types when the second word was an open-class not a closed-class word, suggesting a relationship between prosodic and syntactic information in an utterance-initial position that infants may use to make sentence-type distinctions.
Research has demonstrated differences in the characteristics of infant-directed speech (IDS) based on age (Stern et al., 1983) and sentence-type (Geffen and Mintz, 2017) but has not examined the two factors together. The current study evaluates whether the acoustics of IDS differ as a function of child's age and sentence-type. The study combines two corpora of native-English adult speakers. Both Corpus1(9mo) (described in Geffen and Mintz, 2017), from the Brent corpus of the CHILDES database (Brent and Siskind, 2001) and Corpus2 (12mo) (described in Thompson, 2019), from naturalistic home-recordings, included statements, yes/no and wh-questions, and were acoustically coded in Praat. Three 2-way mixed ANOVAs with Age (9 and 12 months; between-subjects factor) and Sentence-Type (S, WH, YN; within-subjects factor) on OverallF0range, FinalVowelDuration, and FinalVowelF0range found main effects of Age, and Age X Sentence-Type interaction for OverallF0range. There was also a significant effect of Age on FinalVowelDuration. Results demonstrated a developmental shift in acoustic characteristics of IDS, with more exaggerated prosody to younger infants, supporting Stern et al. (1983) and suggests that IDS to older children no longer privileges prosody as strongly. Future studies should investigate whether similar developmental adjustments in IDS occur in languages other than English.
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