Prosodic structure and consonant development across languages

Abstract

This paper relates consonant development in first-language acquisition to the mastery of rhythmic structure, starting with the emergence of the "core syllable" in babbling. We first review results on very early phonetic development that suggest how a rich hierarchy of language-specific metrical structures might emerge from a universal developmental progression of basic utterance rhythms in interaction with ambient language input. We then describe salient differences in prosodic structures across the languages being studied in a cross-language investigation of phonological development, in which we are eliciting and analyzing recordings from hundreds of children aged two years through five years who are acquiring Cantonese, English, Greek, or Japanese. Finally, we present examples of how patterns of disfluent consonant production differ across children acquiring the different languages in this set, in ways that seem to be related to the differences in metrical organization across the languages.

Prosodic aspects of repetition in Swedish-speaking children with developmental language disorder

“…consonants), while prosodic features have received less attention (Roy & Chiat, 2004). Prosody functions as a scaffolding for the detection and acquisition of lexical, syntactic and phonological elements (Arbisi-Kelm & Beckman, 2009;Jusczyk, 1997), and the development of prosodic skills important in communication continues well after the age of school entry in children with typical language development (TLD; Wells, Pepp e, & Goulandris, 2004). Therefore, investigations of what role prosody plays in tasks that are indicative of language disorders (such as NWR) are motivated.…”

Prosody in First Language Acquisition – Acquiring Intonation as a Tool to Organize Information in Conversation

“…In psycholinguistic research, the term refers to patterns of timing, tune, and emphasis that are used to convey a wide range of information from speaker to hearer, including the speaker's affect, illocutionary force, linguistic pragmatic intent (such as emphatic or corrective contrast), and grammatical structure, such as the location of syntactic phrasal boundaries and word boundaries. Prosody provides ‘a rhythmic scaffolding’ (Arbisi‐Kelm and Beckman forthcoming) that highlights important temporal locations in the speech stream, such as the location of words that convey central aspects of an utterance's message, and the locations where critical information about the phonological, syntactic, and semantic content are aligned in time. The production and comprehension of prosody is by necessity examined from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including phonetics, phonology, speech perception, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics.…”

Prosodic and Phonological Ability in Children with Developmental Language Disorder and Children with Hearing Impairment: In the Context of Word and Nonword Repetition

“…An interest in the potential relationship between the ability to repeat prosodic word and nonwords features and language ability, spurred the second general research question. Prosodic ability has been proposed to play an important role in the acquisition of lexical, grammatical and phonological elements, for example by providing cues to word and phrase boundaries, and by highlighting important information (Arbisi-Kelm & Beckman, 2009). However, such proposals are only remotely suggestive of a relationship between the ability to repeat prosodic features in word or nonwords, and more general language ability.…”

“…Prosody functions as a scaffolding for the detection of important elements of the speech stream (Arbisi-Kelm & Beckman, 2009). The use of prosody plays an important role in first language acquisition from the beginning (Speer & Ito, 2009), and sensitivity to prosodic structure has been shown to exist already in newborn infants (Christophe, Mehler, & Sebastián-Gallés, 2001).…”

“…Initially, the experience of prosody is presumably purely signal-based, and linguistic meaning is only gradually assigned to the prosodic features of the speech stream (DePaolis, Vihman, & Kunnari, 2008). However, there appears to be an effect of the prosody of the ambient language before connections to meaning are made (Arbisi-Kelm & Beckman, 2009). Nine-month-old infants have been shown to segment words based on rhythmical patterns (Echols, Crowhurst, & Childers, 1997), and there are language specific intonational differences in multisyllabic babble utterances between e.g.…”