Production of Mental State Intonation in the Speech of Toddlers and Their Caretakers

Armstrong, Meghan E.

doi:10.1080/10489223.2016.1242588

Cited by 8 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 59 publications

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“…facial gestures related to uncertainty) were present, and suggest that visual information may help bootstrap children into linguistic meaning, as has been proposed in other work (Butcher & Goldin-Meadow, 2000;Kelly, 2001;McNeill, Cassell, & McCullough, 1994). In terms of production, Armstrong (2018) showed that by the second half of the third year of life, two Puerto Rican Spanish-acquiring toddlers had produced some type of belief marking intonation within the question domain, though it is unclear to what extent these types of questions are comprehended at that age.…”

Section: Intonation Facial Gesture and Belief Statessupporting

confidence: 55%

Developmental and cognitive aspects of children’s disbelief comprehension through intonation and facial gesture

et al. 2018

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This article investigates how children leverage intonational and gestural cues to an individual's belief state through unimodal (intonation-only or facial gesture-only) and multimodal (intonation + facial gesture) cues. A total of 187 preschoolers (ages 3-5) participated in a disbelief comprehension task and were assessed for Theory of Mind (ToM) ability using a false belief task. Significant predictors included age, condition and success on the ToM task. Performance improved with age, and was significantly better for the multimodal condition compared to both unimodal conditions, suggesting that even though unimodal cues were useful to children, the presence of reinforcing information for the multimodal condition was more effective for detecting disbelief. However, results also point to the development of intonational and gestural comprehension in tandem. Children that passed the ToM task significantly outperformed those that failed

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Section: Intonation Facial Gesture and Belief Statessupporting

confidence: 55%

Developmental and cognitive aspects of children’s disbelief comprehension through intonation and facial gesture

et al. 2018

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“…In fact, the response-eliciting vs. non-response-eliciting distinction may appear before a child's first birthday (Halliday, 2004 [1975]). The finding from Armstrong (2018) coincides with the production of other types of mental state language (e.g., Shatz et al , 1983).…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 64%

“…The work on children's production of epistemic prosody is quite limited. In a longitudinal corpus study of two Puerto Rican Spanish-acquiring toddlers between the ages of 1;7 and 3;6, Armstrong (2018) found that polar question contours that convey epistemic information 3 are not present in the corpora until some time during the third year (one of the toddlers produced her first belief contour at 2;8, while the other produced her first belief contour at 3;0). Each of the toddlers only produced two instances of belief state polar question contours in their respective corpus.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children's epistemic inferences through modal verbs and prosody

Armstrong

2020

J. Child Lang.

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This study explores how young children infer nuances in epistemic modality through prosody. A forced-choice task was used, testing children's (ages three to seven) comprehension of the might/will distinction (modal condition) as well their ability to modulate the strength of might through two prosodic tunes (prosody condition). Positive and negative valence conditions were included. Younger children were shown to start off performing above chance for the modal condition, and at around chance for the prosody condition, but after age four performance on the prosody condition quickly improved. For both modal verbs and prosody, children performed significantly better when valence was positive. By age seven, children performed at ceiling for all conditions. Qualitative analysis of children's justifications for prosody responses showed metalinguistic awareness of prosodic meaning as early as age four, with the ability to relate prosody to epistemic modal meaning becoming quite common by age seven.

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“…Awareness of a speaker's epistemic state (e.g., a knowledgeable vs. an ignorant speaker) based on contextual evidence (not prosodic cues) is present even in 12-month-old infants (Liszkowski et al, 2008). However, various cross-sectional studies have demonstrated that it is in the time window between 3 and 5 years of age that children start to employ prosodic signals to comprehend and express epistemic meanings (Hübscher et al, 2017(Hübscher et al, , 2019bArmstrong, 2018;. In a study investigating the expression of (dis)belief in 1-to 3-year-olds, Armstrong (2018) found that around 3 years of age the children began to be able to express their belief about propositional content through polar questions (e.g., they could convey a belief that there was going to be a party the next day by asking a question like "Is there a party tomorrow?").…”

Section: An Overview Of Research On Children's Prosodic Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bridging the Gap Between Prosody and Pragmatics: The Acquisition of Pragmatic Prosody in the Preschool Years and Its Relation With Theory of Mind

et al. 2021

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While it is well known that prosodic features are central in the conveyance of pragmatic meaning across languages, developmental research has assessed a narrow set of pragmatic functions of prosody. Research on prosodic development has focused on early infancy, with the subsequent preschool ages and beyond having received less attention. This study sets out to explore how young preschoolers develop the ability to use prosody to express pragmatic meanings while taking into account children’s Theory of Mind (ToM) development. Though ToM has been suggested to be linked to the development of receptive prosody, little is known about its relationship with expressive prosodic skills. A total of 102 3- to 4-year-old Catalan-speaking children were assessed for their pragmatic prosody skills using 35 picture-supported prompts revolving around a variety of social scenarios, as well as for their ToM skills. The responses were analyzed for prosodic appropriateness. The analyses revealed that 3- to 4-year-olds successfully produced prosody to encode basic expressive acts and unbiased speech acts such as information-seeking questions. Yet they had more trouble with complex expressive acts and biased speech acts such as the ones that convey speakers’ beliefs. Further analyses showed that ToM alone is not sufficient to explain children’s prosodic score, but the prosodic performance in some pragmatic areas (unbiased pragmatic meanings) was predicted by the interaction between ToM and age. Overall, this evidence for the acquisition of pragmatic prosody by young preschoolers demonstrates the importance of bridging the gap between prosody and pragmatics when accounting for prosodic developmental profiles, as well as taking into account the potential influence of ToM and other socio-cognitive and language skills in this development.

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Production of Mental State Intonation in the Speech of Toddlers and Their Caretakers

Cited by 8 publications

References 59 publications

Developmental and cognitive aspects of children’s disbelief comprehension through intonation and facial gesture

Developmental and cognitive aspects of children’s disbelief comprehension through intonation and facial gesture

Children's epistemic inferences through modal verbs and prosody

Bridging the Gap Between Prosody and Pragmatics: The Acquisition of Pragmatic Prosody in the Preschool Years and Its Relation With Theory of Mind

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