“The tiger is hitting! the duck too!” 3-year-olds can use prosodic information to constrain their interpretation of ellipsis

Kolberg, Letícia Schiavon; Carvalho, Alex de; Babineau, Mireille; Havron, Naomi; Fiévet, Anne‐Caroline; Abaurre, Bernadete; Christophe, Anne

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104626

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 57 publications

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“…Accordingly, children below 3 years of age seem unable to rely on prosodic information to enrich the semantic/pragmatic interpretation of utterances (as in e.g. ellipsis) (Kolberg et al., 2021). Likewise, the prosodic cues typically marking an ironic utterance are not mastered by children until the age of 6 (González‐Fuente, 2017).…”

Section: A Model For the Evolution Of Prosody Under Hsd Forcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Human self‐domestication and the evolution of prosody

Benítez‐Burraco

Elvira-García

2023

Language and Linguist. Compass

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Human self‐domestication refers to a new evolutionary hypothesis about human origins. According to this view, humans have experienced changes that are similar to those observed in domesticated mammals and that have provided us with many of the behavioural, and perhaps cognitive pre‐requisites for supporting our complex social practices and advanced culture. At the core of this hypothesis is the claim that self‐domestication is triggered by (and entails) a reduction in reactive aggression responses. The human self‐domestication hypothesis has been recently used to explain how grammars became more sophisticated via a cultural mechanism. Nonetheless, less research has been done in the domain of phonology, even though animal evidence suggests that domestication favours call complexity too. In this paper, we hypothesise about the effects of our increased self‐domestication on human prosody. We argue for a progressive complexification of prosody that parallels (and might be involved in a positive feed‐back loop with) the complexification of grammar in response to a reduction in reactive aggression. We build on evidence of diverse nature, from language typology to brain function to language acquisition studies.

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Section: A Model For the Evolution Of Prosody Under Hsd Forcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Human self‐domestication and the evolution of prosody

Benítez‐Burraco

Elvira-García

2023

Language and Linguist. Compass

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“…We know that children younger than 3 years are not able to rely on prosodic information to enrich the semantic/pragmatic interpretation of utterances (as in e.g. ellipsis) (Kolberg et al, 2021). Likewise, prosodic cues for irony are usually not mastered by children until the age of 6 (González-Fuente, 2017).…”

Section: Stage 3: Transitive Vp Stagementioning

confidence: 99%

Human self-domestication and the evolution of prosody

Benítez‐Burraco¹,

Elvira-García²

2022

Speech Prosody 2022

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Human self-domestication refers to a new evolutionary hypothesis about human origins. According to this view, humans have experienced changes that are similar to those observed in domesticated mammals and that have provided us with many of the behavioural, and perhaps cognitive prerequisites for supporting our complex social practices and advanced culture. At the core of this hypothesis is the claim that self-domestication is triggered by a reduction in reactive aggression. The human self-domestication hypothesis has been recently used to account for aspects of the sophistication of the grammars of human languages resulting from a cultural mechanism.Nonetheless, less research has been done in the domain of phonology, even though animal evidence suggests that domestication favours call complexity. In this paper, we hypothesize about the effects of increased self-domestication on human prosody. We argue for a progressive complexification of prosody that parallels (and is possibly involved in a positive feed-back loop with) the complexification of grammar in response to a reduction in reactive aggression levels. We build on evidence of diverse nature, from language typology to language acquisition studies.

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“…Sentence comprehension depends on several factors: the lexical content at the word level, the structure at the syntactic level, and the prosody form in which it is delivered. Prosody plays an important role in spoken sentence comprehension and may influence syntactic interpretations (1) affecting the resolution of syntactic ambiguities (2)(3)(4)(5) . Two theoretical accounts aim to explain how prosody affects the resolution of syntactic ambiguities based on position and size of prosodic boundaries.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Are prosodic effects on sentence comprehension dependent on age?

Fortunato-Tavares

Schwartz

Andrade

et al. 2023

CoDAS

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Purpose to investigate prosodic boundary effects on the comprehension of attachment ambiguities in Brazilian Portuguese and to test two hypotheses relying on the notion of boundary strength: the absolute boundary hypothesis (ABH) and the relative boundary hypothesis (RBH). Manipulations of prosodic structure influence how listeners interpret syntactically ambiguous sentences. However, the role of prosody in spoken language comprehension of sentences has received limited attention in languages other than English, particularly from a developmental perspective. Methods Twenty-three adults and 15 children participated in a computerized sentence comprehension task involving syntactically ambiguous sentences. Each sentence was recorded in eight different prosodic forms with acoustic manipulations of F0, duration and pause varying the boundary size to reflect predictions of the ABH and RBH. Results Children and adults differed in how prosody influenced their syntactic processing and children were significantly slower than adults. Results indicated that interpretation of sentences varied according to their prosodic forms. Conclusion Neither the ABH or the RBH explained how children and adults who speak Brazilian Portuguese use prosodic boundaries to disambiguate sentences. There is evidence that the way prosodic boundaries influence disambiguation varies cross-linguistically.

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“The tiger is hitting! the duck too!” 3-year-olds can use prosodic information to constrain their interpretation of ellipsis

Abstract: Young children can use prosodic information to interpret ellipsis 1 "The tiger is hitting! The duck too!" 3-year-olds can use prosodic information to constrain their interpretation of ellipsis

Cited by 3 publications

References 57 publications

Human self‐domestication and the evolution of prosody

Human self‐domestication and the evolution of prosody

Human self-domestication and the evolution of prosody

Are prosodic effects on sentence comprehension dependent on age?

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