Interpretation of contrastive pitch accent in six- to eleven-year-old English-speaking children (and adults)

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.

Prosody Perception in Typically Developing School-aged Children

“…They also reported that vocal emotion recognition in children develops later than the corresponding linguistic ability. Ito, Bibyk, Wagner, and Speer [58] reported agerelated improvements in interpreting contrastive accent in children aged between 6 and 11 years, however even the 11 year olds showed delayed responses compared to adults. This suggests that it may take many years for children to acquire the pragmatic meaning of pitch accent.…”

Effects of contrastive accents on children’s discourse comprehension

“…The previous research introduced a puzzle: young children are able to rapidly use contrastive accents to make online predictions about upcoming referents (Ito et al, 2014) but they fail to use contrastive accents in offline judgment (Cruttenden, 1985;Wells et al, 2004). This discrepancy could reflect task demands: the previous offline tasks required participants to make inferences about an unknown context.…”

“…While it is clear that children are able to use contrastive accents for making local predictions (Ito, Bibyk, Wagner, & Speer, 2014;Ito, Jincho, Minai, Yamane, & Mazuka, 2012;Sekerina & Trueswell, 2012), we do not know how these accents affect their subsequent representation of the discourse, or their ability to remember it. The present study explores this question in 5-year-old children.…”

“…The support for this claim comes from eye-tracking studies exploring the role of contrastive accents in predicting upcoming referents. For example, in Ito et al 's (2014) study, 6-to 11-year-old children heard a pair of sentences each containing a color adjective followed by a head noun.…”

“…By 6 years of age, children use contrastive accents during online comprehension to predict upcoming referents (Ito et al, 2014;Sekerina & Trueswell, 2012). But, at this age, children's performance on offline tasks of accent comprehension is poor (e.g., Wells et al, 2004).…”