A Longitudinal Study of Children’s Intonation in Narrative Speech

Abstract

Adults' narratives are hierarchically structured. This structure is evident in the linguistic and prosodic domains. Children's narratives have a flatter structure. This structure is evident in the linguistic domain, but less is known about the prosodic domain. Here, we report results from a longitudinal study of children's narratives that enhance our understanding of the development of discourse prosody. Spontaneous narratives were obtained from 60 children (aged 5 to 7) over a 3-year period. F0 was tracked to obtain absolute measures of slope steepness and linearity for every utterance of each narrative. These measures are known correlates of syntactic and semantic complexity. Slope direction and inter-utterance continuity in F0 were also calculated. These measures are known correlates of event boundaries in adult discourse. The results indicated systematic developmental changes related to age and year for all measures except slope steepness, consistent with developmental increases in linguistic complexity and the production of more adult-like narratives. The evidence also indicates that developmental change is most pronounced between the ages of 5 and 7 years, and levels out afterwards.

Developmental changes in articulation rate and phonic groups during narration in French children aged four to eleven years

“…A common basic way to index and track linguistic changes in the child's speech is to calculate the Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) out of a child's speech production over a period of time or during a given task (Brown, 1973). In a longitudinal study on discourse prosody in children's narratives, Kallay and Redford (2016) found an increase in MLUmeasured as the number of fluently produced words per speech unitin children aged five to seven years, with values ranging from 4.79 words in the five-year-olds' narratives to 5.26 words in the six-year-olds', and to 5.59 in the seven-year-olds'.…”

“…In contrast to the monotone and flat prosody-like retelling in children aged six to nine years, older children were found to use heterogeneous prosodic and voicing patterns (e.g., slow speech vs. fast speech, loud vs. low or whispering voice, and vocal expressions of various emotions, together with contrasted use of rising and falling tones) during their performance. This change towards putting more information into voice and prosody was related to a similar change in both gaze patterns and bodily behavior, and was analyzed as contributing to the marking of an increasing complexity in the narration per se, with verbal narratives from older children including personal comments and reported speech, breaks in the narrative thread, contrasts between depicting the background and narrating the foreground, expressing main vs. minor events, and given vs. new information, Similarly, analyzing prosodic patterns -F0 contours, slope steepness, and boundary tonesin greater detail in a longitudinal study on children aged five to eight years narrating a story, Kallay and Redford (2016) found that children's narratives gradually become more adult-like in the prosodic domain. The authors interpreted changes in frequency patterns over age as indexing a gradual shift towards a 'look ahead' strategy, where speech is planned beyond the forthcoming speech unit.…”

Prosody in the Auditory and Visual Domains: A Developmental Perspective

“…Children develop discourse and narrative skills relatively late. At around 5 years of age, children use adult-like discourse markers, dependent clauses and sentential focus to narrate actions with a coherent structure, and these abilities continue to develop over the next years ( Hudson and Shapiro, 1991 ; Berman and Slobin, 1994 ; Diessel and Tomasello, 2005 ; Kallay and Redford, 2016 ). The question is whether gesture and prosodic markers emerge together with the development of syntactic and lexical markers of conceptual structure.…”

“…Also, they display better narrative skills in a story retelling game if they have had access to manual beat gestures marking information focus and event boundaries ( Vilà-Giménez et al, 2017 ). On the speech prosody side, children at age five and six are found to use the appropriate pitch accents with the right alignment to signal new information in the discourse (see Chen, 2018 for a review), and in narratives they mark event boundaries through pitch direction and linearity ( Kallay and Redford, 2016 ). While results from the gesture literature seem to suggest that gesture marking of discourse structure is directly correlated with the development of linguistic skills, results are less conclusive from the speech prosody side.…”

“…While results from the gesture literature seem to suggest that gesture marking of discourse structure is directly correlated with the development of linguistic skills, results are less conclusive from the speech prosody side. Kallay and Redford (2016) propose that the correlation between the development of linguistic skills and the development of discourse structure might occur at the level of local pitch features, while more global aspects of discourse prosody such as slope steepness, pitch resets, or pause duration might be mediated by non-linguistic factors such as breathing.…”