The limits of metrical segmentation: intonation modulates infants' extraction of embedded trochees

Abstract

A B S T R A C TWe tested German nine month olds' reliance on pitch and metrical stress for segmentation. In a headturn preference paradigm, infants were familiarized with trisyllabic words (weak-strong-weak (WSW) stress pattern) in sentence contexts. The words were presented in one of three naturally occurring intonation conditions: one in which high pitch was aligned with the stressed syllable and two misalignment conditions (with high pitch preceding vs. following the stressed syllable). Infants were tested on the SW unit of the WSW carriers. Experiment  showed recognition only when the stressed syllable was high pitched. Intonation of test items (similar vs. dissimilar to familiarization) had no influence (Experiment ). Thus, German nine month olds perceive stressed syllables as word onsets only when high pitched, although they already generalize over different pitch contours. Different mechanisms underlying this pattern of results are discussed. I N T R O D U C T I O NIn fluent speech, the prosodic realization of words differs depending on a number of factors, such as speaking rate, emotional attitude of the speaker, the word's position in the phrase, sentence type, illocution, etc. For * We thank Sophie Egger and Jana Schlegel for recording, acoustic analyses, recruitment of participants, and testing. We are very grateful to Janet Grijzenhout, head of the Baby Speech Laboratory at the University of Konstanz, for making available the lab's database and facilities as well as insightful comments. We also acknowledge support from an AFF research grant from the University of Konstanz awarded to Bettina Braun (FP /). Further, we thank René Kager and Anne Cutler for discussion on the experiments and data, and in particular Elizabeth Johnson for sharing her invaluable HPP expertise and for very helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Finally, we owe special thanks to two anonymous reviewers and the editor for their suggestions and remarks.

Konstanz prosodically annotated infant-directed speech corpus (KIDS corpus)

“…It is thus conceivable that nouns provide a gateway to language acquisition, independent of other properties that make early nouns special (e.g., concreteness, referentiality). Moreover, the results presented above provide an explanation of another finding from a recent segmentation study [13], which showed that only high-pitched stressed syllables (but not low-pitched ones) are taken as word onsets by German infants. The high frequency of LH*L in the corpus, compared to other patterns used in [13] (LL*H, HL*L), might account for this finding.…”

“…The authors argue that nouns are prosodically more salient than verbs due to the accentuation pattern of the sentence [12]. Furthermore, [13] demonstrate that German nine-month-olds only treat stressed syllables as word onsets when they are high-pitched. Investigating the frequency distribution of accentual patterns in IDS might help to understand these findings better.…”

Beat gestures help preschoolers recall and comprehend discourse information

“…In our view, the null effects of prosodic prominence in our recall task can be explained by a lack of a saliency effect, in the sense that the target items were not perceived to be prosodically different from the rest of the words in the child-directed discourse. It is well known that child-directed speech is characterised by a slower speech rate, higher pitch range, and larger F0 excursions than adult-directed speech (e.g., Zahner, Schönhuber, & Braun, 2016). In our materials, the short narratives presented to children contained a very systematic use of L+H* pitch accentuation.…”

Infants Segment Words from Songs—An EEG Study

“…Prosodic accentuation on the target word is essential for segmentation by 6-month-olds and facilitates segmentation for 9-month-olds, although it may become less important when infants are 12 months of age [83]. Moreover, exact alignment of the accentuated pitch peak with the stressed syllable of the word appears to be critical [84]. General prosodic exaggeration across the speech stream, as observed in infant-directed speech (IDS), facilitates segmentation on the basis of transitional probabilities in 8-month-olds [85] and possibly even newborns [86].…”