Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-995ml Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-17T20:53:43.341Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Prosodic differences between declaratives and interrogatives in infant-directed speech*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2016

SUSAN GEFFEN*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Southern California
TOBEN H. MINTZ
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, and Department of Linguistics, University of Southern California
*
Address for correspondence: Susan Geffen, PhD, Department of Psychology, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada. e-mail: susan.geffen@ucalgary.ca

Abstract

In many languages, declaratives and interrogatives differ in word order properties, and in syntactic organization more broadly. Thus, in order to learn the distinct syntactic properties of the two sentence types, learners must first be able to distinguish them using non-syntactic information. Prosodic information is often assumed to be a useful basis for this type of discrimination, although no systematic studies of the prosodic cues available to infants have been reported. Analysis of maternal speech in three Standard American English-speaking mother–infant dyads found that polar interrogatives differed from declaratives on the patterning of pitch and duration on the final two syllables, but wh-questions did not. Thus, while prosody is unlikely to aid discrimination of declaratives from wh-questions, infant-directed speech provides prosodic information that infants could use to distinguish declaratives and polar interrogatives. We discuss how learners could leverage this information to identify all question forms, in the context of syntax acquisition.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

We would like to thank the members of the USC Language Development Lab for their help with this research as well as the families that participated in this study. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. BCS-1227074 awarded to T. Mintz and S. Geffen. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

References

REFERENCES

Bartels, C. (1999). The intonation of English statements and questions: a compositional interpretation. New York / London: Garland Publishing Inc.Google Scholar
Best, C., Levitt, A. & McRoberts, G. (1991). Examination of language-specific influences in infants’ discrimination of prosodic categories. In Proceedings of the 12th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (Vol. 4, 162–165). Aix-en-Provence: Universite de Provence Service des Publications.Google Scholar
Brent, M. & Siskind, J. (2001). The role of exposure to isolated words in early vocabulary development. Cognition 81, 3144.Google Scholar
Cruttenden, A. (1986). Intonation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Dryer, M. S. (2011). Polar questions. In Dryer, M. S. & Haspelmath, M. (eds), The world atlas of language structures online (chapter 116). Munich: Max Plank Digital Library. Online: <http://wals.info/chapter/116> (last accessed 12 November 2013).Google Scholar
Face, T. (2007). The role of intonation cues in the perception of declaratives and absolute interrogatives in Castilian Spanish. Estudios de fonética experimental 16, 185225.Google Scholar
Fernald, A. (1984). The perceptual and affective salience of mothers’ speech to infants. In Feagans, L., Garvey, C. & Golinkoff, R. (eds), The origins and growth of communication, 529. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Fernald, A. & Kuhl, P. (1987). Acoustic determinants of infant preference for motherese speech. Infant Behavior and Development 10, 279–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fisher, C., Hall, D., Rakowitz, S. & Gleitman, L. (1994). When it is better to receive than to give: syntactic and conceptual constraints on vocabulary growth. Lingua 92, 333–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fisher, C. & Tokura, H. (1996). Acoustic cues to grammatical structure in infant directed speech: cross linguistic evidence. Child Development 67, 3192–218.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Frota, S., Butler, J. & Vigário, M. (2014). Infants’ perception of intonation: Is it a statement or a question? Infancy 19, 194213.Google Scholar
Geffen, S. (2014). When and how infants discriminate between declaratives and interrogatives. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Southern California.Google Scholar
Geffen, S. & Mintz, T. (2015). Can you believe it? 12-month-olds use word order to distinguish between declaratives and polar interrogatives. Language Learning and Development 11, 270–84.Google Scholar
Gerken, L., Jusczyk, P. & Mandel, D. (1994). When prosody fails to cue syntactic structure: 9-month-olds’ sensitivity to phonological versus syntactic phrases. Cognition 51, 237–65.Google Scholar
Gordon, M. (1999). The intonational structure of Chickasaw. In Ohala, J. J., Hasegawa, Y., Ohala, M., Granville, D., and Bailey, A. C. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 3 (pp. 1993–6). Berkeley: University of California.Google Scholar
Gósy, M. & Terken, J. (1994). Question marking in Hungarian: timing and height of pitch peaks. Journal of Phonetics 22, 269–81.Google Scholar
Grabe, E. 2004. Intonational variation in urban dialects of English spoken in the British Isles. In Gilles, P. & Peters, J. (eds), Regional variation in intonation 931. Tubingen: Niemeyer.Google Scholar
Gussenhoven, C. & Chen, A. (2000). Universal and language-specific effects in the perception of question intonation. In B. Yuan, T. Huang, & X. Tang (Eds.), 6th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing 2000 Vol. 1 (pp. 91–94). Beijing: China Military Friendship Publish.Google Scholar
Hay, J. & Saffran, J. (2012). Rhythmic grouping biases constrain infant statistical learning. Infancy 17, 610–41.Google Scholar
Hedberg, N., Sosa, J. & Fadden, L. (2004). Meanings and configurations of questions in English. In Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2004, Nara, Japan 309–312.Google Scholar
Hirsh-Pasek, K., Kemler Nelson, D., Jusczyk, P., Cassidy, K., Druss, B. & Kennedy, L. (1987). Clauses are perceptual units for young infants. Cognition 26, 269–86.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jarman, E. & Cruttenden, A. (1976). Belfast intonation and the myth of the fall. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 6, 412.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jusczyk, P., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Kemler Nelson, D., Kennedy, L., Woodward, A. & Piwoz, J. (1992). Perception of acoustic correlates of major phrasal units by young infants. Cognitive Psychology 24, 252–93.Google Scholar
Kemler Nelson, D., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Jusczyk, P. & Cassidy, K. (1989). How the prosodic cues in motherese might assist language learning. Journal of Child Language 16, 5568.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
König, E. & Siemund, P. (2007). Speech act distinctions in grammar. In Shopen, T. (ed.), Language typology and syntactic description 276324. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ladd, D. (2008). Intonational phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ladefoged, P. & Johnson, K. (2010). A course in phonetics, 6th ed. Boston, MA: Cengage.Google Scholar
Lieberman, P. (1967). Intonation, perception, and language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES Project: tools for analyzing talk, 3rd ed. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Makarova, V. (2007). The effect of pitch peak alignment on sentence type identification in Russian. Language and Speech 50, 385422.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mehler, J., Jusczyk, P., Lambertz, G., Halsted, N., Bertoncini, J. & Amiel-Tison, C. (1988). A precursor of language acquisition in young infants. Cognition 29, 143–78.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Moon, C., Cooper, R. & Fifer, W. (1993). Two-day-olds prefer their native language. Infant Behavior and Development, 16 495500.Google Scholar
Nazzi, T., Bertoncini, J. & Mehler, J. (1998). Language discrimination by newborns: toward an understanding of the role of rhythm. Journal of Experimental Psychology 24, 756–66.Google Scholar
Nespor, M., Shukla, M. & Mehler, J. (2011). Stress-timed vs. syllable-timed languages. In van Oostendorp, M., Ewan, C. J., Hume, E. & Rice, K. (eds), The Blackwell companion to phonology, Vol. 2, 1147–59. Malden, MA / Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Newport, E. (1977). Motherese: the speech of mothers to young children. In Castellan, N. J., Pisoni, D. B. & Potts, G. R. (eds), Cognitive theory, Vol. 2, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Pinker, S. (1984). Language learnability and language development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Rojina, N. (2004). The acquisition of wh- questions in Russian. Nordlyd 32, 6887.Google Scholar
Săfárŏvá, M. & Swerts, M. (2004). On recognition of declarative questions in English. In Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2004, Nara, Japan.Google Scholar
Slobin, D. & Bever, T. (1982). Children use canonical sentence schemas: a crosslinguistic study of word order and inflections. Cognition 12, 229–65.Google Scholar
Soderstrom, M., Ko, E. & Nevzorova, U. (2011). It's a question? Infants attend differently to polar questions and declaratives. Infant Behavior and Development 34, 107–10.Google Scholar
Svetozarova, N. (1998). Intonation in Russian. In Hirst, D. & Di Cristo, A. (eds), Intonation systems: a survey of 20 languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
van Heuven, V. & Haan, J. (2002). Temporal distribution of interrogativity markers in Dutch: a perceptual study. In Gussenhoven, C. & Warner, N. (eds), Papers in laboratory phonology 7, 6186. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
van Heuven, V. & van Zanten, E. (2005). Speech rate as a secondary prosodic characteristic of polarity questions in three languages. Speech Communication 47, 8799.Google Scholar
Vion, M. & Colas, A. (2006). Pitch cues for the recognition of yes – no questions in French. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 35, 427–45.Google Scholar
Xu, Y. (2012). ProsodyPro.praat. Online: <http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/yi/ProsodyPro/>..>Google Scholar