The effects of intonation on infant attention: the role of the rising intonation contour

Abstract

The study was designed to investigate 2-month-old infant preferential attention to a feature found to be characteristic of mothers' speech to their infants. A modified infant-control auditory preference paradigm was employed to assess infants' differential attention to synthetically generated and naturally produced rising and falling intonation contours. Analysis of these data revealed that the infants attended more to the rising naturally produced intonation contour. A reverse pattern of greater attention to the falling contour was found with the synthetically generated stimuli. In addition, inspection of the results permitted the conclusion that the infant-control preference paradigm was a viable method for assessing the 2-month-old infant's preferential attention to auditory stimuli. The results are discussed in terms of their relevance to the study of the infant's developing language reception abilities.[*] Thanks are extended to the members of the Kansas University Infant Laboratory -

Segmentation problems, rhythmic solutions

“…In contrast, the fundamental frequency range of spontaneous speech has been reported in at least some studies to be relatively narrow, at least in intimate conversation (Johns-Lewis 1986, Blaauw 1991. Pitch is a particularly important dimension of infant-directed speech, since the fact that infants prefer to listen to this style of speech (Fernald 1985) has been found to be principally due to its pitch characteristics (Fernald andKuhl 1987, Sullivan andHorowitz 1983). Ohala (1983Ohala ( , 1984 has argued that raised pitch is an ethologically universal signal of smallness, ingratiation and non-threatening attitude.…”

“…Against this conclusion, on the other hand, might be cited the more recent findings that the pitch manipulations found in infant-directed speech in American English and related languages are apparently nor universal. Although rising contours predominate in infant-directed speech in the stress languages English (Sullivan and Horowitz 1983) and German (Fernald and Simon 1984) falling contours are more prevalent in the tone languages Mandarin (Grieser and Kuhl 1988) and Thai (Tuaycharoen 1978). In a comprehensive review of the literature on pitch in infant-directed speech, Shute (1987) concluded that pitch modifications are not only clearly not universal across languages, but may also differ within one language as a function of sex of the speaker, age of the child addressee, frequency of the speaker's interaction with children and other factors.…”

Vocal Pitch in Motherese

“…It appears that she is here referring to linguistic features of motherese, but it is equally possible that the child may also shape paralinguistic aspects of input. In a similar vein, Sullivan & Horowitz (1983) suggested that the mother's speech is geared toward eliciting responses from her infant. The implication of this is that the infant's response will further modify the mother's behaviour.…”

“…One very obvious factor to be taken into account is the high frequency of the occurrence of questions typical of speech addressed to children (e.g. Sullivan & Horowitz, 1983). In adult speech (at least in the English language) questions are strongly associated with rising pitch.…”

“…For example, questions are associated with a rising contour. It is interesting to consider this observation in the light of Sullivan & Horowitz's (1983) report that infants attended more to a rising contour (in female voices) than a falling one. It is very likely that there may be a relationship between these factors and the commonly observed tendency for motherese to be characterised by a high rate of questioning.…”