Early Prosodic Development

Mata, Ana Isabel; Moniz, Helena; Batista, Fernando

doi:10.1075/ihll.6.14fro

Cited by 9 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…Children’s socio-cognitive and lexical skills increase in concert with their use of prosodic features as they grow older. For example, Portuguese, Catalan, and Spanish children between 1 and 2 years of age produce some basic, pragmatically appropriate, intonation contours, which reflect a variety of speech acts such as vocatives, statements, or requests, and express various intentions (Prieto et al, 2012; Frota et al, 2016). Taken together, these findings demonstrate that both gestural and prosodic cues to speech act information develop in an integrated fashion in the early stages of communicative development and well before children can make the same speech act distinctions by verbal means (see Cameron-Faulkner, 2014).…”

Section: Developmental Evidence That Gesture and Prosody Are Precursomentioning

confidence: 99%

Gestural and Prosodic Development Act as Sister Systems and Jointly Pave the Way for Children’s Sociopragmatic Development

Hübscher

Prieto

2019

Front. Psychol.

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Children might combine gesture and prosody to express a pragmatic meaning such as a request, information focus, uncertainty or politeness, before they can convey these meanings in speech. However, little is known about the developmental trajectories of gestural and prosodic patterns and how they relate to a child's growing understanding and propositional use of these sociopragmatic meanings. Do gesture and prosody act as sister systems in pragmatic development? Do children acquire these components of language before they are able to express themselves through spoken language, thus acting as forerunners in children's pragmatic development? This review article assesses empirical evidence that demonstrates that gesture and prosody act as intimately related systems and, importantly, pave the way for pragmatic acquisition at different developmental stages. The review goes on to explore how the integration of gesture and prosody with semantics and syntax can impact language acquisition and how multimodal interventions can be used effectively in educational settings. Our review findings support the importance of simultaneously assessing both the prosodic and the gestural components of language in the fields of language development, language learning, and language intervention.

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Section: Developmental Evidence That Gesture and Prosody Are Precursomentioning

confidence: 99%

Gestural and Prosodic Development Act as Sister Systems and Jointly Pave the Way for Children’s Sociopragmatic Development

Hübscher

Prieto

2019

Front. Psychol.

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“…The description of the prosodic system of EP has advanced during the last few years (see Frota, 2014, for a review), and there has been recent work in the field of prosodic acquisition both in early perception and in production (Butler, Vigário, & Frota, 2016; Frota et al, 2014; Frota, Matos, Cruz, & Vigário, 2016). The adaptation of a test such as the PEPS-C to assess EP prosodic development from preschool through adulthood will allow new studies covering prosodic development.…”

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confidence: 99%

Prosodic development in European Portuguese from childhood to adulthood

Filipe

Peppé

Frota

et al. 2017

Applied Psycholinguistics

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We describe the European Portuguese (EP) version of a test of prosodic abilities originally developed for English -the Profiling Elements of Prosody in Speech-Communication (PEPS-C; Peppé & McCann, 2003). Using this test, we examined the development of several components of EP prosody between 5 and 20 years of age (N = 131). Results showed prosodic performance improving with age: 5-year-olds reach adult-like performance in the affective prosodic tasks; 7-year-olds mastered the ability to discriminate and produce short prosodic items, as well as the ability to understand question versus declarative intonation; 8-year-olds mastered the ability to discriminate long prosodic items; 9-year-olds mastered the ability to produce question versus declarative intonation, as well as the ability to identify focus; 10/11-year-olds mastered the ability to produce long prosodic items; 14/15-year-olds mastered the ability to comprehend and produce syntactically ambiguous utterances disambiguated by prosody; and 18/20-year-olds mastered the ability to produce focus. Crosslinguistic comparisons showed that linguistic form-meaning relations do not necessarily develop at the same pace across languages. Some prosodic contrasts are hard to achieve for younger Portuguese-speaking children, namely the production of Chunking and Focus.Keywords: prosody, assessment, prosodic development, European Portuguese 4 PROSODIC DEVELOPMENT IN EUROPEAN PORTUGUESE Prosodic development in European Portuguese from childhood to adulthood Prosody plays an important part in the production and comprehension of the organization of speech, manifested by patterns of intonation, rhythm, prominence, and chunking of the speech continuum. Several form-meaning relations are established or contributed to by prosody, namely sentence type distinctions, the highlighting of important information, the demarcation of speech units (also known as phrasing), and different kinds of affective meanings (Halliday, 1967; Ladd, 2008). Many prosodic form-meaning relations convey linguistic meanings, that is meanings related to the message, such as interrogativity, finality, or focus, which may (or not) be grammaticalized in different languages and in different ways (Gussenhoven, 2002(Gussenhoven, , 2016. For example, interrogativity tends to be signalled by high or rising pitch, and finality by low pitch (as in English or Portuguese), but in Swedish a final low tone is used both in statements and questions; focus in West Germanic languages is typically achieved by the presence of a pitch contour in the prominent element (accentuation) and absence of accentuation on words that follow the prominent element, whereas other languages may use different types of accents to contrast focused and unfocused words (such as Portuguese; Frota, 2014). Other prosodic form-meaning relations express meanings related to the state of the speaker, such as the affective meanings of (un)happy or (un)cooperative, which tend to be less arbitrary and thus less language-specific (Gussenhoven, 2016)...

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“…Probably, the boundary cues of the phonological utterance are recognized by preterm infants. Our results suggest an early ability to understand "turn-end" (Filipe et al, 2017), as well as to recognize maternal tonal utterances that precede pauses (Frota et al, 2016).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 71%

“…Its exaggerated prosodic properties assist infants in segmenting the speech sequence and detecting regularities (Hartman et al, 2017). Boundary cues of intonational phrases are processed early in children's language development (Frota, 2016). Also, the early discrimination between phonetic units of native and non-native language is enhanced by social interaction (Kuhl et al, 2003;García-Sierra et al, 2021).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Linguistic and prosodic features of motherese and preterm infants' vocalizations during kangaroo care

Carvalho

Pais-Ribeiro

Rincón³

et al. 2023

CLR

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Motherese has been studied particularly in its prosodic features. The scientific literature has underlined the importance of this type of communication on the infants’ vocal responsiveness. However, we still know little about the role of motherese on preterm infants’ vocal responsiveness. We intend to know the prosodic and communicative characteristics of motherese in preterm dyads and particularly to understand its relationship with the preterm infant’s vocal responsiveness. At NICU, mothers (N = 38) were asked to speak and to sing without words (humming) to their preterm infants in kangaroo care during five periods of three minutes alternating voice and silence, controlling the order effect (silence – speech or humming – silence – humming or speech – silence). A microanalytical study about prosodic and communicative/affectionate features of motherese was performed using ELAN, MAXQDA, and PRAAT software. According to results, tonal contours (sinusoidal, U-shaped and falling) and infants’ vocalizations seem to contribute for preterm dyads’ vocal modulation. A high use of phatic and conative functions, interrogative utterances, infants’ positive aspects, infants designated by affectionate words, and utterances connected with infants' needs were observed. This study contributed to explore the role of the communicative/affectionate and prosodic features of the motherese on preterm infants’ vocal responsiveness during the kangaroo care in NICU. Still, more studies are needed to deepen these preliminary results.

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Early Prosodic Development

Cited by 9 publications

References 47 publications

Gestural and Prosodic Development Act as Sister Systems and Jointly Pave the Way for Children’s Sociopragmatic Development

Gestural and Prosodic Development Act as Sister Systems and Jointly Pave the Way for Children’s Sociopragmatic Development

Prosodic development in European Portuguese from childhood to adulthood

Linguistic and prosodic features of motherese and preterm infants' vocalizations during kangaroo care

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