Skip to main content

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
Cancel
×
×
Home
  • Home
Article
  • Cited by 33
  • Cited by
    Crossref Citations
    Crossref logo
    This article has been cited by the following publications. This list is generated based on data provided by CrossRef.
    Janciauskas, Marius and Chang, Franklin 2018. Input and Age-Dependent Variation in Second Language Learning: A Connectionist Account. Cognitive Science, Vol. 42, Issue. , p. 519.
    Kalashnikova, Marina Goswami, Usha and Burnham, Denis 2018. Mothers speak differently to infants at-risk for dyslexia. Developmental Science, Vol. 21, Issue. 1, p. e12487.
    Çöltekin, Çağrı 2017. Using Predictability for Lexical Segmentation. Cognitive Science, Vol. 41, Issue. 7, p. 1988.
    de Carvalho, Alex Dautriche, Isabelle Lin, Isabelle and Christophe, Anne 2017. Phrasal prosody constrains syntactic analysis in toddlers. Cognition, Vol. 163, Issue. , p. 67.
    Grimm, Robert Cassani, Giovanni Gillis, Steven and Daelemans, Walter 2017. Facilitatory Effects of Multi-Word Units in Lexical Processing and Word Learning: A Computational Investigation. Frontiers in Psychology, Vol. 8, Issue. ,
    Spinelli, Maria Fasolo, Mirco and Mesman, Judi 2017. Does prosody make the difference? A meta-analysis on relations between prosodic aspects of infant-directed speech and infant outcomes. Developmental Review, Vol. 44, Issue. , p. 1.
    HARTMAN, KELLY M. RATNER, NAN BERNSTEIN and NEWMAN, ROCHELLE S. 2017. Infant-directed speech (IDS) vowel clarity and child language outcomes. Journal of Child Language, Vol. 44, Issue. 05, p. 1140.
    Reimchen, Melissa and Soderstrom, Melanie 2017. Do Questions Get Infants Talking? Infant Vocal Responses to Questions and Declaratives in Maternal Speech. Infant and Child Development, Vol. 26, Issue. 3, p. e1985.
    Schwab, Jessica F. and Lew-Williams, Casey 2016. Language learning, socioeconomic status, and child-directed speech. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, Vol. 7, Issue. 4, p. 264.
    Peter, Varghese Kalashnikova, Marina Santos, Aimee and Burnham, Denis 2016. Mature neural responses to Infant-Directed Speech but not Adult-Directed Speech in Pre-Verbal Infants. Scientific Reports, Vol. 6, Issue. 1,
    de Carvalho, Alex Lidz, Jeffrey Tieu, Lyn Bleam, Tonia and Christophe, Anne 2016. English-speaking preschoolers can use phrasal prosody for syntactic parsing. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Vol. 139, Issue. 6, p. EL216.
    Jódar-Sánchez, José Antonio 2016. L2 Spanish intonation for Finnish speakers. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, Vol. 3, Issue. 1, p. 15.
    Hawthorne, Kara Rudat, Lauren and Gerken, LouAnn 2016. Prosody and the Acquisition of Hierarchical Structure in Toddlers and Adults. Infancy, Vol. 21, Issue. 5, p. 603.
    Hartshorne, Joshua K. O’Donnell, Timothy J. Sudo, Yasutada Uruwashi, Miki Lee, Miseon and Snedeker, Jesse 2016. Psych verbs, the linking problem, and the acquisition of language. Cognition, Vol. 157, Issue. , p. 268.
    Spinelli, Maria Fasolo, Mirco Tagini, Angela Zampini, Laura Suttora, Chiara Zanchi, Paola and Salerni, Nicoletta 2016. Linguistic and prosodic aspects of child-directed speech: The role of maternal child-rearing experiences. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, Vol. 13, Issue. 2, p. 183.
    Golinkoff, Roberta Michnick Can, Dilara Deniz Soderstrom, Melanie and Hirsh-Pasek, Kathy 2015. (Baby)Talk to Me. Current Directions in Psychological Science, Vol. 24, Issue. 5, p. 339.
    LONGOBARDI, EMIDDIA ROSSI-ARNAUD, CLELIA SPATARO, PIETRO PUTNICK, DIANE L. and BORNSTEIN, MARC H. 2015. Children's acquisition of nouns and verbs in Italian: contrasting the roles of frequency and positional salience in maternal language. Journal of Child Language, Vol. 42, Issue. 01, p. 95.
    Hawthorne, Kara Mazuka, Reiko and Gerken, LouAnn 2015. The acoustic salience of prosody trumps infants’ acquired knowledge of language-specific prosodic patterns. Journal of Memory and Language, Vol. 82, Issue. , p. 105.
    Seidl, Amanda Tincoff, Ruth Baker, Christopher and Cristia, Alejandrina 2015. Why the body comes first: effects of experimenter touch on infants' word finding. Developmental Science, Vol. 18, Issue. 1, p. 155.
    HARTSHORNE, JOSHUA K. POGUE, AMANDA and SNEDEKER, JESSE 2015. Love is hard to understand: the relationship between transitivity and caused events in the acquisition of emotion verbs. Journal of Child Language, Vol. 42, Issue. 03, p. 467.
    Download full list
    ×
  • Get access
    Add to cart USD25.00
    Check if you have access via personal or institutional login
    Log in Register Recommend to librarian

Acoustical cues and grammatical units in speech to two preverbal infants*

  • MELANIE SODERSTROM (a1), MEGAN BLOSSOM (a2), RINA FOYGEL (a1) and JAMES L. MORGAN (a1)
Abstract

The current study examines the syntactic and prosodic characteristics of the maternal speech to two infants between six and ten months. Consistent with previous work, we find infant-directed speech to be characterized by generally short utterances, isolated words and phrases, and large numbers of questions, but longer utterances are also found. Prosodic information provides cues to grammatical units not only at utterance boundaries, but also at utterance-internal clause boundaries. Subject–verb phrase boundaries in questions also show reliable prosodic cues, although those of declaratives do not. Prosodic information may thus play an important role in providing preverbal infants with information about the grammatically relevant word groupings. Furthermore, questions may play an important role in infants' discovery of verb phrases in English.

Copyright
COPYRIGHT: © 2008 Cambridge University Press
Corresponding author
Address for correspondence: Melanie Soderstrom, University of Manitoba, Department of Psychology, P404 Duff Roblin Building, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3T 2N2, Canada.
Footnotes
Hide All
[*]

The authors wish to thank the two mothers and their families for their time and commitment to the study. This work was supported by a Kirschstein NRSA postdoctoral research fellowship 5F32HD042927 to MS and an NIH grant 1RO1HD32005 to JLM. We thank the reviewers for insightful comments on previous drafts.

Footnotes
References
Hide All
Barker, B. A. & Newman, R. S. (2004). Listen to your mother! The role of talker familiarity in infant streaming. Cognition 94, B45–B53.
Bernstein, Ratner N. (1986). Durational cues which mark clause boundaries in mother–child speech. Phonetics 14, 303–309.
Blauww, E. (1994). The contribution of prosodic boundary markers to the perceptual difference between read and spontaneous speech. Speech Communication 14, 359–75.
Boersma, P. (2001). Praat, a system for doing phonetics by computer. Glot International 5, 341–45.
Bortfeld, H., Morgan, J. L., Golinkoff, R. M. & Rathbun, K. (2005). Mommy and me: Familiar names help launch babies into speech-stream segmentation. Psychological Science 16, 298–304.
Brent, M. R. & Siskind, J. M. (2001). The role of exposure to isolated words in early vocabulary development. Cognition 81, B33–B44.
Fenson, L., Dale, P. S., Reznick, J. S., Thal, D., Bates, E., Hartung, J. P. et al. (1993). The MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories: User's Guide and Technical Manual. San Diego: Singular Publishing Group.
Fernald, A. & McRoberts, G. (1996). Prosodic bootstrapping: A critical analysis of the argument and the evidence. In Morgan, J. L. & Demuth, K. (eds) From signal to syntax: Bootstrapping from speech to grammar in early acquisition, 365–88. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Fernald, A., Taeschner, T., Dunn, J., Papousek, M., de Boysson-Bardies, B. & Fukui, I. (1989). A cross-language study of prosodic modifications in mothers' and fathers' speech to preverbal infants. Journal of Child Language 16, 477–501.
Fisher, C. & Tokura, H. (1996 a). Acoustic cues to grammatical structure in infant-directed speech: Cross-linguistic evidence. Child Development 67, 3192–218.
Fisher, C. & Tokura, H. (1996 b). Prosody in speech to infants: Direct and indirect cues to syntactic structure. In Morgan, J. L. & Demuth, K. (eds) Signal to syntax, 343–64. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Furrow, D., Nelson, K. & Benedict, H. (1979). Mothers' speech to children and syntactic development: some simple relationships. Journal of Child Language 6, 423–42.
Gee, J. P. & Grosjean, F. (1983). Performance structures: A psycholinguistic and linguistic appraisal. Cognitive Psychology 15, 411–25.
Gerken, L. A., Jusczyk, P. W. & Mandel, D. R. (1994). When prosody fails to cue syntactic structure: Nine-month-olds' sensitivity to phonological versus syntactic phrases. Cognition 51, 237–65.
Gleitman, L. R. & Wanner, E. (1982). Language acquisition: The state of the state of the art. In Wanner, E. & Gleitman, L. R. (eds) Language acquisition: The state of the art, 3–48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jusczyk, P. W. (1998). Constraining the search for structure in the input. Lingua 106, 197–218.
Jusczyk, P. W., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Kemler, Nelson D. G., Kennedy, L., Woodward, A. & Piwoz, J. (1992). Perception of acoustic correlates of major phrasal units by young infants. Cognitive Psychology 24, 252–93.
Kaye, K. (1980). Why we don't talk ‘baby talk’ to babies. Journal of Child Language 7, 489–507.
Klatt, D. H. (1975). Vowel lengthening is syntactically determined in a connected discourse. Journal of Phonetics 3, 129–40.
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES Project: Tools for analyzing talk, 3rd ed. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Mandel, D. R., Jusczyk, P. W. & Kemler, Nelson D. G. (1994). Does sentential prosody help infants to organize and remember speech information? Cognition 53, 155–80.
Morgan, J. L. (1986). From simple input to complex grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Morgan, J. L. & Newport, E. L. (1981). The role of constituent structure in the induction of an artificial language. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 20, 67–85.
Nelson, K. (1973). Structure and strategy in learning to talk. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 38, 1–135.
Newport, E. L., Gleitman, H. & Gleitman, L. R. (1977). Mother, I'd rather do it myself: Some effects and non-effects of maternal speech style. In Snow, C. E. & Ferguson, C. A. (eds) Talking to children, 109–149. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Papousek, M., Papousek, H. & Haekel, M. (1987). Didactic adjustments in fathers' and mothers' speech to their 3-month-old infants. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 16, 491–516.
Penman, R., Cross, T., Milgrom-Friedman, J. & Meares, R. (1983). Mothers' speech to prelingual infants: a pragmatic analysis. Journal of Child Language 10, 17–34.
Phillips, J. R. (1973). Syntax and vocabulary of mothers' speech to young children: Age and sex comparisons. Child Development 44, 182–85.
Pinker, S. (1994). Language learnability and language development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Sachs, J. (1977). The adaptive significance of linguistic input to prelinguistic infants. In Snow, C. E. & Ferguson, C. A. (eds) Talking to children: Language input and acquisition, 51–61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shady, M. (1996). Infants' sensitivity to function morphemes. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, State University of New York, Buffalo.
Sherrod, K. B., Friedman, S., Crawley, S., Drake, D. & Devieux, J. (1977). Maternal language to prelinguistic infants: syntactic aspects. Child Development 48, 1662–65.
Snow, C. E. (1977). The development of conversation between mothers and babies. Journal of Child Language 4, 1–22.
Soderstrom, M., Seidl, A., Kemler, Nelson D. G. & Jusczyk, P. W. (2003). The prosodic bootstrapping of phrases: Evidence from prelinguistic infants. Journal of Memory and Language 49, 249–67.
Soderstrom, M., White, K. S., Conwell, E. & Morgan, J. L. (2007). Receptive grammatical knowledge of familiar content words and inflection in 16-month-olds. Infancy 12, 1–29.
Stern, D. N., Spieker, S., Barnett, R. K. & MacKain, K. (1983). The prosody of maternal speech: Infant age and context related changes. Journal of Child Language 10, 1–15.
Stern, D. N., Spieker, S. & MacKain, K. (1982). Intonation contours as signals in maternal speech to prelinguistic infants. Developmental Psychology 18, 727–35.
van de Weijer, J. (2002 a). How much does an infant hear in a day? Paper presented at the GALA 2001 Conference on Language Acquisition.
van de Weijer, J. (2002 b). Terminal rises in infant-directed and adult-directed question. In Speech, Music and Hearing, Quarterly Progress and Status Report, Vol. 44 (Proceedings of Fonetik, 2002), 5–8, Stockholm, Sweden.
Wightman, C., Shattuck-Hufnagel, S., Ostendorf, M. & Price, P. (1992). Segmentation durations in the vicinity of prosodic boundaries. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 91, 1707–717.
Recommend this journal

Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this journal to your organisation's collection.

Journal of Child Language
  • ISSN: 0305-0009
  • EISSN: 1469-7602
  • URL: /core/journals/journal-of-child-language
Please enter your name
Please enter a valid email address
Who would you like to send this to? *

CAPTCHA *

Skip to the audio challenge
×

Metrics

Altmetric attention score

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 9
Total number of PDF views: 95 *
Loading metrics...

Abstract views

Total abstract views: 464 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between September 2016 - 13th June 2018. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

Cancel
Confirm
×