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Abstract

Analysis and description of Italian children’s prosody for narrative speech in an Autosegmental-Metrical framework.
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... Nonetheless, the youngest participants showed a lower use of the continuation final rising compared to older children and adults. The same result was also found in a preliminary study on Italian children (Zanchi et al., 2016). ...
... Moreover, prosodic competence does not always follow a linear trajectory during development (e.g., Snow 2006, Zanchi. 2016. For Italian, Zanchi et al. (2016) and collaborators analysed the prosody of the narratives produced by preschoolers attending the first year of kindergarten and then one year later. The results showed differences between the two time points in the prosodic realisation of narratives, a sort of "regression" in some aspects of prosody mas ...
... 2016. For Italian, Zanchi et al. (2016) and collaborators analysed the prosody of the narratives produced by preschoolers attending the first year of kindergarten and then one year later. The results showed differences between the two time points in the prosodic realisation of narratives, a sort of "regression" in some aspects of prosody mastery, which the authors explained by considering the relationships amongst different competencies, such as prosody, syntax and narration. ...
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This investigation focuses on the development of intonation patterns in four Catalan-speaking children and two Spanish-speaking children between 0 ; 11 and 2 ; 4. Pitch contours were prosodically analyzed within the Autosegmental Metrical framework in all meaningful utterances, for a total of 6558 utterances. The pragmatic meaning and communicative function were also assessed. Three main conclusions arise from the results. First, the study shows that the Autosegmental Metrical model can be successfully used to transcribe early intonation contours. Second, results reveal that children's emerging intonation is largely independent of grammatical development, and generally it develops well before the appearance of two-word combinations. As for the relationship between lexical and intonational development, the data show that the emergence of intonational grammar is related to the onset of speech and the presence of a small lexicon. Finally, we discuss the implications of these results for the biological hypothesis of intonational production.
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Several descriptions of the transition from single to multiword utterances use prosody as an important diagnostic criterion. For example, in contrast to successive single-word utterances, 'real' two-word utterances are supposed to be characterized by a unifying intonation contour and a lack of an intervening pause. Research on the acquisition of prosody, however, revealed that control of the phonetic parameters pitch, loudness, and duration is far from complete at such an early stage. In this study, we examine the interaction between the development of different types of syntactic structures and their prosodic organization. Data from a detailed production record of a monolingual German-learning boy is analysed both auditorily and acoustically with a focus on four different types of two-word utterances produced between 2;0 and 2;3. Two major findings are reported here. First, the different types of two-word utterances undergo individual trajectories of prosodic (re-)organization, in part depending on the time course in which they become productive. This suggests that different types of multiword utterances become prosodically fluent at different points in time. Second, the variability of prosodic features such as pauses and stress pattern is very high at the onset of combinatorial speech. Consequently, fluency or disfluency of individual examples should not be used as a reliable criterion for their syntactic status and we recommend caution when taking prosody as a cue for syntactic development.
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he chapters all share a common methodology, based on a common Discourse Completion Task questionnaire, and provide extensive empirical data. The authors then analyse how intonation patterns work together with other grammatical means such as syntactic constructions and discourse particles in the linguistic marking of a varied set of sentence types and pragmatic meanings across Romance languages. The ToBI prosodic systems and annotations proposed for each language are based both on a phonological analysis of the target language as well as on the shared goal of using ToBI analyses that are comparable across Romance languages. This book will pave the way for more systematic typological comparisons of prosody across both Romance and non-Romance languages.
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Developmental theories of intonation are typically based on the idea that linguistic pitch patterns reflect biological or emotional “natural tendencies”. Accordingly, these theories predict that intonation will develop along with the infant's earliest speech-like vocalizations. This article examines the empirical and theoretical basis of the claim that children master intonation before the onset of speech. As a background for studying prosodic development, Section 2 describes three components of intonation: (1) intonation-groups, (2) forms of intonation, and (3) tonal meanings. Section 3 presents criteria for evaluating children's development in each of these areas. Section 4 focuses on studies of children's development of intonation from 3 to 25 months of age, with special attention to the grammatical, pragmatic, and affective/attitudinal functions of pitch patterns. Most studies were not designed to meet the criteria specified in Section 3. Although this makes any conclusions very tentative at present, our review suggests that children control some core features of intonation before they produce two-word combinations— but not before they produce their first words. Register seems to be the first component of intonation to stabilize in the single-word period. Except for pre-intentional associations between pitch level and affect, natural tendencies are not sufficient to account for children's development of intonation.
Prosodic characterisHcs of early mulH-word uQerances in Italian children
  • L D'odorico
  • S Carubbi
D'Odorico, L., & Carubbi, S. (2003). Prosodic characterisHcs of early mulH-word uQerances in Italian children. First Language, 23(1), 97-116.