Intonation facilitates contrast resolution: Evidence from Japanese adults and 6-year olds

Ito, Kiwako; Jincho, Nobuyuki; Minai, Utako; Yamane, Naoto; Mazuka, Reiko

doi:10.1016/j.jml.2011.09.002

Cited by 51 publications

(84 citation statements)

References 51 publications

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“…Thus, the present tree decoration task, while eliciting no linguistic responses from participants, may have provided a sufficient visual environment and task structure to allow participants to interpret the sequence of bare [color + ornament] noun phrases as a component in a coherent discourse. More importantly, the present results support the validity and generalizability of past work that has demonstrated the effect of pitch prominence to evoke contrastive interpretation of a referential expression produced in lab speech in a more narrowly selected group of participants (e.g., Dahan et al, 2002;Ito & Speer, 2008Ito et al, 2012;Ito et al, 2014;Kurumada et al, 2014;Weber et al, 2006).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

Allophonic tunes of contrast: Lab and spontaneous speech lead to equivalent fixation responses in museum visitors

Ito

Turnbull

Speer³

2017

Laboratory Phonology

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Ito, K et al 2017 Allophonic tunes of contrast: Lab and spontaneous speech lead to equivalent fixation responses in museum visitors. Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology 8(1): 6, pp. contours as well as data collected from a uniform participant group-college students. The present study tested visitors to a science museum, who better represent the general public, comparing lab and spontaneous speech to replicate the contrast-evoking effect of prominent pitch accent. Across two eye-tracking experiments where participants followed spoken instructions to decorate Christmas trees, spontaneous two-word [L+H* unaccented] contours led to faster eye-movements to contrastive ornament sets than [H* !H*] contours with no delay as compared to lab speech. The differences in the fixation functions were overall smaller than those in a previous study that used clear lab speech in richer contexts. Detailed acoustic analyses indicated that the lab speech tune types were distinguishable by any of several independent F0 measures on the adjective and by F0 slope. In contrast, no single phonetic measure on the spontaneous speech adjective distinguished between tune types, which were best classified according to independent noun-based measures. However, a non-linear c ombination of the adjective measures was shown to be equal to the noun measures in distinguishing between the [H* !H*] and [L+H* unaccented] tunes. The eye-movement data suggest that naïve listeners were comparably sensitive to both lab and spontaneous prosodic cues on the adjective and made anticipatory eye-movements accordingly.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

Allophonic tunes of contrast: Lab and spontaneous speech lead to equivalent fixation responses in museum visitors

Ito

Turnbull

Speer³

2017

Laboratory Phonology

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“…As discussed above, children have been shown to successfully integrate stress information in some interpretative domains, including the interpretation of pronouns (e.g., Maratsos 1973), scalar terms (e.g., Miller et al 2005), and in reference resolution (e.g., Ito et al 2012). Our results, showing children's use of stress information in interpreting scrambled sentences, indicate that children are able to integrate stress information to improve their comprehension of syntactically complex, 'hard' sentences that involve scrambling.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…More relevant to the current study, children's sensitivity to emphatic stress and their ability to incorporate the stress cues into language processing has been observed in Japanese, as well. For example, Ito et al (2012) revealed that Japanese-acquiring children are able to effectively utilize the prosodic prominence to efficiently identify the referent being mentioned, on par with adult native speakers of Japanese.…”

Section: (7)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Acquisition and Use of Linguistic Knowledge: Scrambling in Child Japanese as a Test Case

Minai

Isobe

Okabe

2015

J Psycholinguist Res

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The current study investigates preschool-age children's comprehension of scrambled sentences in Japanese. While scrambling has been known to be challenging for children, biasing them to exhibit non-adult-like interpretations (e.g., Hayashibe in Descr Appl Linguist 8:1-18, 1975; Sano in Descr Appl Linguist 10:213-233, 1977; Suzuki in Jpn J Educ Psychol 25(3):56-61, 1977), children are able to interpret scrambled sentences in an adult-like way when the pragmatics is enriched in the experiments (Otsu in Acquisition studies in generative grammar, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp 253-264, 1994). These findings suggest that children's difficulty in comprehending scrambling may be due to processing difficulties (Suzuki in J Psycholinguist Res 42(2), 119-137, 2013), such as the Lexical-ordering Strategy bias (Bever in Cognition and language development, Wiley, New York, pp 279-352, 1970), rather than their lack of the linguistic knowledge of scrambling. The current study revealed that children are indeed able to utilize prosodic information to interpret scrambled sentences in an adult-like way. Our findings provide converging evidence in favor of the proposal that children's grammatical knowledge of scrambling is intact, although they are more vulnerable than adults to processing difficulties that hinder their ability to successfully interpret scrambled sentences.

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“…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.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 91%

“…Ito et al (2012) have attributed children's poor performance on these offline tasks to the lack of a supportive discourse context. The support for this claim comes from eye-tracking studies exploring the role of contrastive accents in predicting upcoming referents.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of contrastive accents on children’s discourse comprehension

Lee

Snedeker

2016

Psychon Bull Rev

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What role do contrastive accents play in children's discourse comprehension? 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). To examine whether the asymmetry could reflect a developmental stage in which the processing system uses contrastive accents to make local predictions, but fails to incorporate this information into discourse representations, we tested the effect of contrastive accents on children's memory of the content of a discourse. Five-year-olds heard 12 different stories consecutively, one after another, and the critical words were manipulated so that they were produced either with a contrastive L+H* accent or with a presentational H* accent. We found that children remembered facts about the contrast set better when the target word had an appropriate contrastive accent earlier than when it had a presentational accent. The results show that by 5 years, children are able to use contrastive accents for encoding a discourse, as well as for making local predictions during online comprehension.

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Intonation facilitates contrast resolution: Evidence from Japanese adults and 6-year olds

Cited by 51 publications

References 51 publications

Allophonic tunes of contrast: Lab and spontaneous speech lead to equivalent fixation responses in museum visitors

Allophonic tunes of contrast: Lab and spontaneous speech lead to equivalent fixation responses in museum visitors

Acquisition and Use of Linguistic Knowledge: Scrambling in Child Japanese as a Test Case

Effects of contrastive accents on children’s discourse comprehension

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