Infants' Perception of Intonation: Is It a Statement or a Question?

Abstract

The ability to distinguish phonetic variations in speech that are relevant to meaning is essential for infants' language development. Previous studies into the acquisition of prosodic categories have focused on lexical stress, lexical pitch accent, or lexical tone. However, very little is known about the developmental course of infants' perception of linguistic intonation. In this study, we investigate infants' perception of the correlates of the statement/yes-no question contrast in a language that marks this sentence type distinction only by prosodic means, European Portuguese (EP). Using a modified version of the visual habituation paradigm, EP-learning infants at 5-6 and 8-9 months were able to successfully discriminate segmentally varied, single-prosodic word intonational phrases presented with statement or yes-no question intonation, demonstrating that they are sensitive to the prosodic cues marking this distinction as early as 5 months and maintain this sensitivity throughout the first year. These results suggest the presence of precocious discrimination abilities for intonation across segmental variation, similarly to previous reports for lexical pitch accent, but unlike previous findings for word stress.

Simulating the cross-linguistic pattern of Optional Infinitive errors in children’s declaratives and Wh- questions

“…The first is that, like many distributional learning mechanisms (though see Frank, Goldwater & Keller, 2013 Given the obvious prosodic, pragmatic and structural differences between declaratives and questions, this feature of the model might be regarded as somewhat implausible, particularly in view of recent evidence that even very young children can distinguish between declaratives and questions in the input (Seidl, Hollich & Jusczyk, 2003;Homae, Watanabe, Nakano, Asakawa & Taga, 2006;Soderstrom, Ko & Nevzorova, 2011, Geffen & Mintz, 2012Frota, Butler & Vigário, 2014). For example, Geffen and Mintz (2015) show that by 12 months children can distinguish between declaratives and polar interrogatives even in the absence of prosodic cues, and argue that although infants initially use phonological information to distinguish between sentence types, they have already begun to learn generalisations about the corresponding word-order patterns before the onset of multi-word speech.…”

Infants’ Perception of the Intonation of Broad and Narrow Focus

“…Insert Table 1 here _________________________________________ 2 One-word utterances were used since this is the most common prosodic domain for a melody in EP infant-directed speech (Frota, Butler & Vigário, 2014).…”

“…In addition, the intonation used within each sentence type in their stimuli was very variable (e.g., declarative sentences ending with either flat, falling or bell shaped contours), which may have affected infants' perception of the contours. Frota, Butler & Vigário (2014) utilised single prosodic word utterances differing in prosodic cues related to the statement/yes-no question contrast in European Portuguese, a language that marks this contrast by prosodic cues only (in EP, unlike in English, there is no inversion in yes-no questions -Mateus, Brito, Duarte, Faria, Frota, Matos, Oliveira, Vigário, & Villalva, 2003). They found that both 5-6 and 8-9 month-old European Portuguese learning infants were able to discriminate the sentence type prosodic contrast despite segmental variability.…”

“…The Japanese lexical pitch accent contrast studied in Sato et al (2009) consisted of High-Low versus LowHigh words. The sentence type distinction investigated by Frota et al (2014) was cued by low pitch in statements versus rising pitch in questions (i.e., L% and LH%). In Seidl (2007) and Shukla et al (2011) studies on clause and word segmentation, differences in pitch level and/or pitch shape may also have been the cues that were used.…”

“…If perceptual abilities related to pitch contrasts in general show an early/precocious development (or are domain-general abilities, even across different species), we expect contrasts utilising pitch timing to behave as other types of pitch contrasts. Phonetic salience and distribution across languages may also link to differences in perceptual abilities (as suggested in Frota et al, 2014). Pitch contrasts have been shown to be especially salient and detected early by infants compared with other sound features (He, Hotson & Trainor, 2007;Bion et al, 2011), and some form of linguistic melody seems to be present in all languages, be it tone, lexical pitch accent or intonation (Gussenhoven, 2004), but the same is not necessarily true for stress (as there are languages with no apparent phonetic stress - Beckman, 1986) or for the phonemic use of duration.…”