Pragmatic prosody development from 3 to 8 years of age: A cross-sectional study in Catalan

Pronina, Mariia; Hübscher, Iris; Vilà-Giménez, Ingrid; Prieto, Pilar

doi:10.21437/speechprosody.2022-19

Cited by 3 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…Starting with the findings on expressive pragmatics skills, we expected the pragmatic scores obtained in the APT (Pronina et al, 2019) to be strongly related to structural language and less so to mentalizing. The results confirmed our expectations.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To achieve this, we employed a recently developed assessment tool that evaluates expressive pragmatic and prosodic abilities in children (i.e., Audiovisual Pragmatic Test, APT, Pronina et al, 2019) by looking at speech act production from the point of view of pragmatics and prosody. Moreover, we included in the assessment various components of mentalizing (i.e., false belief, metacognitive vocabulary, and emotion understanding) and structural language (i.e., vocabulary and syntax).…”

Section: The Present Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Children's expressive pragmatic and prosodic abilities were evaluated using the Audiovisual Pragmatic Test (APT, Pronina et al, 2019). The APT assesses the production of a broad range of speech acts (e.g., requests and declaratives) that are typical of the child's day-to-day life.…”

Section: Expressive Pragmatic and Prosodic Skillsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Expressive Pragmatics and Prosody in Young Preschoolers are More Closely Related to Structural Language than to Mentalizing

Pronina

Prieto

Bischetti

et al. 2022

Language Learning and Development

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Pragmatics lies at the point where language meets the social world and encompasses both the linguistic and the social dimensions of communication. However, the relationship between pragmatic abilities, other language skills, and socio-cognitive aspects such as mentalizing is still a matter of wide debate. This study sets out to investigate the status of pragmatic abilities by testing from a developmental angle their relationship with other linguistic skills and mentalizing. We examined the role of structural language and mentalizing on both expressive pragmatic and prosodic skills in typically developing preschool children. A total of 105 3-to 4-year-old children were assessed on pragmatics and prosody with the Audiovisual Pragmatic Test, as well as on structural language skills (vocabulary and syntax) and a series of mentalizing measures (false belief, emotion understanding, and metacognitive vocabulary). A combined approach including correlations, regressions, and structural equation modeling (SEM) was used. Structural language was a strong positive predictor of both pragmatic and prosodic scores, while mentalizing predicted neither pragmatic nor prosodic performance. We suggest that in preschool years, expressive pragmatics and prosodic skills are more closely related to structural language skills than to mentalizing.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Present Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Expressive Pragmatics and Prosody in Young Preschoolers are More Closely Related to Structural Language than to Mentalizing

Pronina

Prieto

Bischetti

et al. 2022

Language Learning and Development

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“…Even within the first two years of life, before they begin producing complex grammatically correct utterances, children display functional linguistic capacities that LLMs lack, and that interact in key ways with their development. For example, pragmatic knowledge and gesture play an important role in how children incrementally (but rapidly) build their grammars (Yang, 2022;Woods & Heim, 2023), with prosodic competence also feeding into development (though this is less well understood; Frota et al, 2014;Goodhue et al, 2023;Patel & Grigos, 2006;Pronina et al, 2022). These pragmatic, gestural and prosodic capacities are independently essential for achieving successful, functional linguistic interaction.…”

Section: Multimodality and Interactionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The limitations of large language models for understanding human language and cognition

Cuskley,

Woods,

Flaherty

2024

Preprint

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Researchers have recently argued that the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) can provide new insights into longstanding debates about the role of learning and/or innateness in the development and evolution of human language. Here, we argue on two grounds that LLMs alone tell us very little about human language and cognition in terms of acquisition and evolution. First, any similarities between human language and the output of LLMs are purely functional. Borrowing the “four questions” framework from ethology, we argue that what LLMs do is superficially similar, but how they do it is not. In contrast to the rich multimodal data humans leverage in interactive language learning, LLMs rely on immersive exposure to vastly greater quantities of unimodal text data, with recent multimodal efforts built upon mappings between images and text. Second, turning to functional similarities between human language and LLM output, we show that human linguistic behavior is much broader. LLMs were designed to imitate the very specific behavior of human writing; while they do this impressively, the underlying mechanisms of these models limit their capacities for meaning and naturalistic interaction, and their potential for dealing with the diversity in human language. We conclude by emphasising that LLMs are not theories of language, but tools that may be used to study language, and that can only be effectively applied with specific hypotheses to motivate research

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“…Previous studies have found that young children can rely on such prosodic information to distinguish between declarative, questions and assertions (see e.g., Patel & Brayton, 2009;Patel & Grigos, 2006;Zhou, Crain, & Zhan, 2012) and to signal and understand internal states such as beliefs, disbeliefs, desires, feelings and emotions Armstrong, Esteve Gibert, Hübscher, Igualada, & Prieto, 2018;Hübscher, Vincze, & Prieto, 2019;Pronina, Hübscher, Vilà-Giménez, & Prieto, 2022;. It is therefore highly possible that prosodic information can be used as an additional cue that might help young language learners learn the different types of meaning that attitude verbs and modals can convey.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

There might be more to syntactic bootstrapping than being pragmatic: A look at grammatical person and prosody in naturalistic child-directed speech

et al. 2023

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In ‘Being pragmatic about syntactic bootstrapping’, Hacquard (2022) argues that abstract syntax is useful for word learning, but that an additional cue, pragmatics, is both necessary and available for young children during the first steps of language acquisition. She focuses on modals and attitude verbs, where the physical context seems particularly impoverished as the sole basis for deriving meanings, and thus where linguistic cues may be particularly helpful. She convincingly shows how pragmatic and syntactic cues could be combined to help young language learners learn and infer the possible meanings of attitude verbs such as “think”, “know” or “want”. She also argues that, in some circumstances, syntax and pragmatics would need to be supplemented by semantic information from context – for instance, in the case of modals such as “might”, “can”, or “must”. We agree with Hacquard on the importance of the synergies between these different cues to meaning, and wish to add two other aspects of the input that might also be used by young children in these contexts. The aspects we describe can only be noticed when one analyzes concrete examples of what children hear in their everyday lives, something which Hacquard does very often in her work (e.g., Dieuleveut, van Dooren, Cournane & Hacquard, 2022; Huang, White, Liao, Hacquard & Lidz, 2022; Yang, 2022). Taking into account different cues for meaning would help the field go beyond current models of syntactic bootstrapping, and create an integrated picture of the synergies between different levels of linguistic information.

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Pragmatic prosody development from 3 to 8 years of age: A cross-sectional study in Catalan

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Expressive Pragmatics and Prosody in Young Preschoolers are More Closely Related to Structural Language than to Mentalizing

Expressive Pragmatics and Prosody in Young Preschoolers are More Closely Related to Structural Language than to Mentalizing

The limitations of large language models for understanding human language and cognition

There might be more to syntactic bootstrapping than being pragmatic: A look at grammatical person and prosody in naturalistic child-directed speech

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