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

Abstract

Recent research on children's acquisition of prosody, or the rhythm and melody in language, demonstrates that young children use prosody in their comprehension and production of utterances to a greater extent than was previously documented. Spoken language, structured by prosodic form, is the primary input on which the mental representations and processes that comprise language use are built. Understanding how children acquire prosody and develop the mapping between prosody and other aspects of language is crucial to any effort to model the role of prosody in the processing system. We focus on two aspects of prosody that have been shown to play a primary role in its use as an organizational device in human languages, prosodic phrasal grouping, and intonational prominence.

The development of children’s ability to track and predict turn structure in conversation

“…Knowing that children comprehend more about prosody than lexicosyntax early on (see Speer & Ito (2009) for a review), we thought it possible that young children would instead show an advantage for prosody in their predictions about turn structure in conversation. Our results suggest that, on the contrary, exclusively presenting prosodic information to children limits their spontaneous predictions about upcoming turn structure until age five.…”

The Role of prosodic skills in reading comprehension

“…Each utterance has its own prosodic structure, which is used to organise utterances for comprehension and memory purposes (e.g., Speer & Ito, 2009). The interaction between prosody and syntax, and between prosody and semantics, at the utterance/local level, are discussed in turn.…”

“…Prosodic 'chunking' or bracketing reduces the listener's memory load, facilitating the efficient use of limited working memory resources in spoken language comprehension Speer & Ito, 2009). For example, it is easier to recall 32642097 when chunked (3264) (2097) than (3 2 6 4 2 0 9 7) when single digits are recalled individually.…”

“…Once words are identified and vocabulary is being built, prosody and the cues it provides are crucial to beginning language users to 'bootstrap' their acquisition of the more complex linguistic hierarchy of syntax. After reviewing the role of prosody in first language acquisition, Speer and Ito (2009) concluded that children's developmental sensitivity to, and use of, prosodic cues in deriving sentential structure elevated prosody to 'a sort of proto-syntax' (p.94).…”

“…When acquiring their native language, newborns and infants utilise prosodic features (e.g., stress at the syllabic and word level, and pause at phonological boundaries) to facilitate the segmentation of the almost continuous speech stream into words, thus contributing to the development of their vocabulary (Bedore & Leonard, 1995;Cutler & Carter, 1987). Further, infants use this prosodic information to segment the speech stream into comprehensible syntactic units such as phrases and clauses, thus facilitating the acquisition of the language's syntactic and semantic structure (Morgan & Demuth, 1996;Peters & Stromqvist, 1996;Speer & Ito, 2009). Unlike the semantic (Pinker, 1987) and the syntactic (Gleitman & Landau, 1994) bootstrapping hypotheses, the prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis does not require the language learner to have any prior linguistic knowledge (e.g., Fernald & McRoberts, 1996;Soderstrom et al, 2003).…”