The Development of Prosody in First Language Acquisition
Abstract
Prosodic development is increasingly recognized as a fundamental stepping stone in first language acquisition. Prosodic sensitivity starts developing very early, with newborns becoming attuned to the prosodic properties of the ambient language, and it continues to develop during childhood until early adolescence. In the last decades, a flourishing literature has reported on the varied set of prosodic skills that children acquire and how they interact with other linguistic and cognitive skills. This book compiles a set of seventeen short review chapters from distinguished experts that have contributed significantly to our knowledge about how prosody develops in first language acquisition. The ultimate aim of the book is to offer a complete state of the art on prosodic development that allows the reader to grasp the literature from an interdisciplinary and critical perspective. This volume will be of interest to scholars and students of psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, speech therapy, and education.
... language acquisition, the reader is directed to a recent detailed compilation of articles (Prieto & Esteve-Gibert, 2018) and the review chapter by Chen et al. (2020). ...
Bilingualism and the study of speech sounds are two of the largest areas of inquiry in linguistics. This Handbook sits at the intersection of these fields, providing a comprehensive overview of the most recent, cutting-edge work on the sound systems of adult and child bilinguals. Bringing together contributions from an international team of world-leading experts, it covers all aspects of the speech perception, production and processing of bilingual individuals, as well as surveying cross-linguistic influences on the phonetics and phonology of bilingualism. The thirty-five chapters are divided into thematic areas covering the theoretical foundations and methodological approaches employed to investigate bilingual speech, overviews of major findings and developments in child and adult bilingual phonology and phonetics, descriptions of the major areas of research within the speech perception, production and processing of the bilingual individual, and examinations of various predictors of cross-linguistic influence and variables affecting the outcomes of bilingual speech.
... These prosodic features of language convey grammatical and pragmatic meaning as well as emotional or affect intent, and highlight particular elements of the utterance (Crystal, 1978;Gleitman et al., 1988;Wells et al., 2004). The development of prosody is of special interest within the larger context of language acquisition, because it is among the earliest aspects of speech to be acquired (Esteve-Gibert & Prieto, 2018) and is strictly linked to the maturity of the vocal tract (Kahane & Kahn, 1984). It is well known that infants are sensitive to prosodic information from a very early age due to their prenatal exposure to speech (Gervain, 2015) and therefore are able to understand the prosodic features of parental speech since the first months of life (De Carvalho et al., 2019;Fisher & Tokura, 1996;Soderstrom et al., 2008) and can manage to imitate the prosody of parental speech, for instance, by adapting their F0 features to match that of the parents (Gratier & Devouche, 2011;Ko et al., 2016;McRoberts & Best, 1997;Papoušek & Papoušek, 1989). ...
Background
The acquisition and development of prosodic aspects of vocal intonation are of special interest within the larger context of language acquisition.
Method
The present study explored the developmental trajectories of infant prosodic abilities from 4 to 16 months of life with an intensive time points assessment. Several aspects were considered: an acoustic analysis of infant vocal productions with specific software, the analyses of all the prosodic variables associated with the fundamental frequency (F0 mean, F0 range, and F0 final contours), the individual variability and the complexity of the vocal productions of the infants.
Results
The multi-level analysis evidenced specific prosodic developmental trajectories that differ for the different kind of vocal productions since the first months of life.
Conclusions
The findings suggest that in the second half of the first year of life infants show an intonational repertoire that may help manage interactions with their caregiver and that individual variability has to be taken in consideration when assessing infants’ prosody.
... If a matching relation exists between prosodic domains and syntactic domains, a strong hypothesis emerges that the match can facilitate the parsing and comprehension of syntactic constituents (e.g., Selkirk, 2011). A plethora of studies have shown that prosody could assist in lexical learning, categorization, clausal typing and structural analysis during infancy (e.g., Esteve-Gibèrt & Prieto, 2018;Godde et al., 2020;Speer & Ito, 2009) and that prosodic cues might aid in the processing of center-embedded structures in both artificial languages and natural languages (Mueller et al., 2010;Roncaglia-Denissen et al., 2013). Singh and Fu (2016) argued that, unlike non-tone languages, tone language learners need to acquire both a lexical tone system and an intonational structure. ...
The aim of this study is to investigate how pragmatic-conceptual representations can be integrated into theories of first language acquisition. Experiment 1, using a sentence–picture judgment task, examined how children (N = 53, aged 4–6 years) used prosody boundaries as cues for a recursive interpretation when the recursive relatives (i.e., SO and OO)1 were garden path structures. The results showed that children below six-year had a stronger preference for recursive reading than adults under the conjunction-biased prosody condition and that children after six years of birth exhibited an adult-like preference for recursive readings under the recursion-biased prosody condition. Experiment 2 explored whether and how reversibility (e.g., “a dog eats a banana” vs “a dog kisses a cat”) in the action schema affected the production of OO and SO in Mandarin-speaking children (N = 137, age: 4–8 years). The results showed that adult-like production of OO in both reversible and irreversible conditions appeared at the age of six. The adult-like production ability of SO showed a one-year delay in the reversible condition (seven years under the reversible condition versus six years under the irreversible condition). The study suggests that some pragmatic-conceptual representations (such as the action schema) may be precursors of language and serve as a default analysis in language acquisition, while the mapping of the prosody domain onto syntax matures over time.
... Previous behavioral research used the head turn preference procedure of short phrase prosody to evaluate prosody discrimination ability and found that behavioral indicators of prosody sensitivity of 6-month-old infants could be used to predict vocabulary size after 18 months [33]. In addition, the ability to process phrase prosody also affects important aspects of learning in the later stages of language development, including information organization, word segmentation, and syntactic analysis in conversation [34]. Therefore, the assessment of early neural prosody discrimination development based on fNIRS plays an important role in the early detection of language delay. ...
Background
Language delay affects near- and long-term social communication and learning in toddlers, and, an increasing number of experts pay attention to it. The development of prosody discrimination is one of the earliest stages of language development in which key skills for later stages are mastered. Therefore, analyzing the relationship between brain discrimination of speech prosody and language abilities may provide an objective basis for the diagnosis and intervention of language delay.
Methods
In this study, all cases(n = 241) were enrolled from a tertiary women’s hospital, from 2021 to 2022. We used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to assess children’s neural prosody discrimination abilities, and a Chinese communicative development inventory (CCDI) were used to evaluate their language abilities.
Results
Ninety-eight full-term and 108 preterm toddlers were included in the final analysis in phase I and II studies, respectively. The total CCDI screening abnormality rate was 9.2% for full-term and 34.3% for preterm toddlers. Full-term toddlers showed prosody discrimination ability in all channels except channel 5, while preterm toddlers showed prosody discrimination ability in channel 6 only. Multifactorial logistic regression analyses showed that prosody discrimination of the right angular gyrus (channel 3) had a statistically significant effect on language delay (odd ratio = 0.301, P < 0.05) in full-term toddlers. Random forest (RF) regression model presented that prosody discrimination reflected by channels and brain regions based on fNIRS data was an important parameter for predicting language delay in preterm toddlers, among which the prosody discrimination reflected by the right angular gyrus (channel 4) was the most important parameter. The area under the model Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was 0.687.
Conclusions
Neural prosody discrimination ability is positively associated with language development, assessment of brain prosody discrimination abilities through fNIRS could be used as an objective indicator for early identification of children with language delay in the future clinical application.
... The simple view of reading (Hoover & Gough, 1990) states that reading comprehension is the product of decoding and oral language comprehension. Awareness of prosody has been strongly linked to oral language comprehension (e.g., Cutler et al., 1997;Prieto & Esteve-Gibert, 2018). Similarly, in the reading systems framework, phonology, of which prosody is a component, leads to general comprehension processes through oral language comprehension (Perfetti & Stafura, 2014;Wade-Woolley et al., 2021). ...
There is growing theoretical and empirical consensus for a role of awareness of suprasegmental phonology, also known as prosody, or the rhythmic elements of speech, in reading comprehension. Here we explore a potential mechanism by which this relation functions: awareness of how punctuation reflects prosody, for instance appreciating that a period or comma often marks a pause. Children who are more aware of prosody might be better able to use punctuation as a guide to what text should sound like, which could enable understanding text meaning. We tested 151 English-speaking students in Grades 3–5 to explore whether the relation between awareness of prosody and reading comprehension is mediated by awareness of how punctuation reflects prosody. After controlling for age, punctuation knowledge, word reading, phonological awareness, vocabulary, and nonverbal ability, there were direct relations between awareness of prosody and reading comprehension, as well as indirect effects via awareness of how punctuation reflects prosody. These results suggest a role for punctuation in applying awareness of prosody to reading comprehension; we interpret this as a potential mechanism by which awareness of prosody supports reading comprehension, a finding that can both refine current models of reading comprehension and inspire the design of effective instruction.
... In production, young children seem to show more accurate control of intonation earlier than duration (Prieto, Estrella, Thorson & Vanrell 2012). Toward the end of the first year of life, children of intonational languages begin to produce linguospecific intonational patterns, which develop rapidly during the second year of life as they learn to associate pragmatic meanings and prosodic features (Esteve-Gibèrt, Prieto, 2018). ...
Our study identifies the developmental trajectory of prominence at lexical and post-lexical levels. From very early in life infants are sensitive to lexical stress contrasts, but, due to very limited vocal capabilities, the production of stress contrasts only starts in the second year of age. We address the question of whether, when and how a child learns to differentiate lexical (stress) from post-lexical prominence (accent) by acoustically examining the spontaneous productions of one child from NorthEast Italy recorded every 3 months from 18 to 36 months of age. Our analysis is cast in the framework of the Autosegmental Metrical Theory of Intonation. Results show that during the child's prosodic development the duration of IP nuclear vowels increases linearly, the duration of unstressed vowels decreases linearly and the duration of stressed, prenuclear and ip nuclear vowels is progressively but non-linearly adjusted, consistent with the adult prosodic hierarchy.
... infants are sensitive to prosodic information that allows them to discriminate rhythmically different languages (Gasparini et al., 2021;Mehler et al., 1988) or syllable pairs differing in their stress patterns (Sansavini et al., 1997), pitch contours, or duration/pitch properties (Abboub et al., 2016). Because prosody is aligned with words and syntactic units, it may help infants learn the structural properties of their languages (Morgan & Demuth, 1996;Prieto & Esteve Gibert, 2018). ...
Rhythm perception helps young infants find structure in both speech and music. However, it remains unknown whether categorical perception of suprasegmental linguistic rhythm signaled by a co‐variation of multiple acoustic cues can be modulated by prior between‐ (music) and within‐domain (language) experience. Here we tested 6‐month‐old German‐learning infants’ ability to have a categorical perception of lexical stress, a linguistic prominence signaled through the co‐variation of pitch, intensity, and duration. By measuring infants’ pupil size, we find that infants as a group fail to perceive co‐variation of these acoustic cues as categorical. However, at an individual level, infants with above‐average exposure to music and language at home succeeded. Our results suggest that early exposure to music and infant‐directed language can boost the categorical perception of prominence. 6‐month‐old German‐learning infants’ ability to perceive lexical stress prominence categorically depends on exposure to music and language at home. Infants with high exposure to music show categorical perception. Infants with high exposure to infant‐directed language show categorical perception. Co‐influence of high exposure to music and infant‐directed language may be especially beneficial for categorical perception. Early exposure to predictable rhythms boosts categorical perception of prominence. We investigate whether rhythm in speech and music is perceived through shared perceptual mechanisms. We show that 6‐month‐old German‐learning infants can fail to perceive lexical stress signaled through the co‐variation of pitch, intensity, and duration as categorical. However, they succeed if they above‐average exposure to music and infant‐directed speech at home. Our results suggest that early exposure to music and language can boost infants' ability to perceive the co‐variation of acoustic cues as categorical.
... Rhythm is very important in spoken language both in first (L1) and second (L2) language acquisition for many reasons. First, rhythm, along with intonation, is the first to acquire by infants (Prieto & Esteve-Gibert 2018). Second, the realization of intonation itself is based on rhythm (Todaka 1990, cited in Celce-Murcia, Brinton, & Goodwin 2010; therefore, without acquiring the right rhythm, it will not be possible to acquire the right intonation. ...
This paper compares Arabic and English speech rhythms to increase awareness of this neglected and often misunderstood topic in foreign language acquisition. Unlike previous studies, we adopt a phonological view of speech rhythm rather than an isochrony-based phonetic view. It details the components of speech rhythm at the word and utterance levels in Arabic and English focusing on the rhythmical differences that would affect the learners’ rhythm of both languages negatively. Findings suggest that Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Jordanian-Ammani Arabic (JAA), unlike English, should be placed at the lower end of the rhythmic continuum. The study opens new directions for future research and concludes with pedagogical implications for learners of Arabic and English.
... The acquisition of cues for phonological contrasts begins early in the first few years of infancy, but an adult-like mastery of the contrasts is not reached until much later in development. The developmental trajectory of linguistic pitch cues, too, spans over the entire childhood and even into early adolescence (see Prieto and Esteve-Gibert, 2018;Chen et al., 2020 for a review). In the case of lexical tone acquisition, early sensitivity to tonal cues develops as early as 4 months (Yeung et al., 2013), and by 3 years, children produce tones with some F0 contrast (Hua and Dodd, 2000). ...
Vocal pitch, which involves not only F0 but also multiple covarying acoustic cues is central to linguistic perception and production at various levels of prosodic structure. Recent studies on language development have shown that differences in learners' musicality affect the F0 cue development in perception of sentence-level intonation or in prosodic realization of focus. This study aims to contribute toward a fuller understanding of the effect of musicality on linguistic pitch development via a close investigation of the relationship between musicality, age, and lexical tone production covering both F0 and spectral cues in children. Forty-three native Mandarin-speaking children between the ages of 4 and 6 years are recruited to participate in both a semi-spontaneous tone production task and a musicality test. For each age (4, 5, and 6 years) and musicality (below or above the median score of each age group) group, the contrastivity of the four tones is evaluated by performing automatic tone classification using three sets of acoustic cues (F0, spectral cues, and both). It has been found that higher musicality is associated with higher contrastivity of the tones produced at the age of 4 and 5 years, but not at the age of 6 years. These results suggest that musicality promotes earlier development of tone production only in earlier stages of prosodic development; by the age of 6 years, the musicality advantage in tone production subsides.
... www.nature.com/scientificreports/ is perceived by audiences 10 . Considering the fact that cross-linguistic evidence shows the early development of prosodic sensitivity to ambient language in newborns 11,12 , it is important to investigate if prosodic characteristics of the human voice are potent to obtain useful information for neurodevelopmental disorders like ASD. Acoustic characteristics expressing prosody are pitch (also known as fundamental frequency), duration and intensity 13 and pitch attributes such as pitch contour, pitch range and pitch variability. ...
In this systematic review, we analyzed and evaluated the findings of studies on prosodic features of vocal productions of people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in order to recognize the statistically significant, most confirmed and reliable prosodic differences distinguishing people with ASD from typically developing individuals. Using suitable keywords, three major databases including Web of Science, PubMed and Scopus, were searched. The results for prosodic features such as mean pitch, pitch range and variability, speech rate, intensity and voice duration were extracted from eligible studies. The pooled standard mean difference between ASD and control groups was extracted or calculated. Using I 2 statistic and Cochrane Q-test, between-study heterogeneity was evaluated. Furthermore, publication bias was assessed using funnel plot and its significance was evaluated using Egger's and Begg's tests. Thirty-nine eligible studies were retrieved (including 910 and 850 participants for ASD and control groups, respectively). This systematic review and meta-analysis showed that ASD group members had a significantly larger mean pitch (SMD = − 0.4, 95% CI [− 0.70, − 0.10]), larger pitch range (SMD = − 0.78, 95% CI [− 1.34, − 0.21]), longer voice duration (SMD = − 0.43, 95% CI [− 0.72, − 0.15]), and larger pitch variability (SMD = − 0.46, 95% CI [− 0.84, − 0.08]), compared with typically developing control group. However, no significant differences in pitch standard deviation, voice intensity and speech rate were found between groups. Chronological age of participants and voice elicitation tasks were two sources of between-study heterogeneity. Furthermore, no publication bias was observed during analyses (p > 0.05). Mean pitch, pitch range, pitch variability and voice duration were recognized as the prosodic features reliably distinguishing people with ASD from TD individuals.
... These findings were further confirmed by the significant improvement detected in the language skills of the cases group (Table 3). These results confirm the role of prosody in language acquisition and word learning [35]. This is supported by the pragmatic and syntactic functions of prosody, as prosody is thought to have a prominent interaction with the pragmatic aspect of language particularly by its role in conveying phrasal stress. ...
Background
Children with hearing impairment are deprived of their source of linguistic input which in turn leads to linguistic and prosodic deficits that negatively affect language and social development. Linguistic aspects other than prosody have received considerable attention in studies concerned with hearing-impaired children with little literature addressing how to improve their affective prosodic deficits. The aim of the current study is to adapt and apply the “prosody treatment program” and detect the effect of prosodic rehabilitation on affect production and language development in Egyptian hearing-impaired children. This study was conducted on 21 children with sensorineural hearing loss. The subjects were randomly divided into two groups, group A (cases) and group B (control) by block randomization. The subjects of the study were evaluated pre and post-therapy by a protocol for assessment of their prosodic skills using subjective and objective measures. Both groups received the usual auditory and language rehabilitation therapy. The case group additionally received rehabilitation for prosody using the “prosody treatment program” for 3 months.
Results
Results showed a statistically significant improvement in the subjective scores and most of the objective scores of the assessed affective prosodic skills when comparing pre-therapy and post-therapy scores in the cases group, and when comparing both studied groups post-therapy.
Conclusions
Prosodic training has an additional benefit evident in improving affective prosodic skills of hearing-impaired children compared to conventional therapy alone with a positive effect on their linguistic development.
Trial registration
The trial is registered at www.clinicaltrials.gov NCT04691830 . Registered under the name “Adaptation of a Rehabilitation Program for Prosody and its Application on Egyptian Hearing Impaired Children”. Retrospectively registered:
... Since the appearance of Rethinking Context (Goodwin & Duranti, 1992), the notion of context as a fixed or predetermined set of conditions and situations has gradually shifted 'towards increasingly more interactive and dialogically conceived notions of Tomasello, 2005). Prosodic analyses have shown that children track common ground and the unfolding of information: from the age of two they mark referring expressions with specific intonation contours depending on the referent's status as informative focus or contrastive focus (Esteve-Gibert & Prieto, 2018;Grünloh et al., 2015;Ito, 2014). These factors influencing linguistic resource selection coincide in spontaneous interaction as natural experiments that place the child in the face of various conditions in order to attain a successful reference. ...
This study’s objective is to analyse repair sequences for referring problems that occur in conversation with young children (two to three years old), which have shown how reference recognition unfolds along a collaborative process. The results reveal that caretakers frame varying repair questions and that the children locally answer the caretakers’ questions, tending to display specific responses for specific repair frames: they either repeat their previous expression or utilize diverse, more informative expressions. Jointly considered, the contributions from children and caretakers display an informational equilibrium characteristic of parallel sequences in adult interactions. The repair sequences clearly attest to the children’s attention to the conversational exchange, the gradual reference optimization in their successive contributions and the delay in conversational progressivity with regard to the primary goal of achieving reference recognition.
... Reduced stress pattern discrimination in 5-month-old infants is a marker of risk for later language impairment (Weber et al., 2004). Furthermore, the ability to process phrasal prosody impacts learning of important aspects of language also later in development, including the organization of information in conversation, word segmentation, and syntactic parsing (Prieto & Esteve-Gibert, 2018;Speer & Ito, 2009). ...
Auditory speech discrimination is essential for normal language development. Children born preterm are at greater risk of language developmental delays. Using functional near‐infrared spectroscopy at term‐equivalent age, the present study investigated early discrimination of speech prosody in 62 neonates born between week 23 and 41 of gestational age (GA). We found a significant positive correlation between GA at birth and neural discrimination of forward versus backward speech at term‐equivalent age. Cluster analysis identified a critical threshold at around week 32 of GA, pointing out the existence of subgroups. Infants born before week 32 of GA exhibited a significantly different pattern of hemodynamic response to speech stimuli compared to infants born at or after week 32 of GA. Thus, children born before the GA of 32 weeks are especially vulnerable to early speech discrimination deficits. To support their early language development, we therefore suggest a close follow‐up and additional speech and language therapy especially in the group of children born before week 32 of GA.
... The motherese used with infants eases the acquisition process (Harris, 2013;Nelson et al., 1989). In turn, infants' babbling is also colored by their native language prosody, even before they utter their first sentences (de Boysson-Bardies et al., 1984;Prieto et Esteve-Gibert, 2018). The development of prosody continues until early adolescence (e.g., see Filipe et al. 2017, in Portuguese or Wells et al. 2004. ...
La lecture est un des savoirs fondamentaux acquis à l’école primaire. D’abord centré sur le décodage dans les premières années, l’enseignement se focalise ensuite essentiellement sur la compréhension et l’automatisation de la lecture. Cette automatisation, souvent désignée abusivement par le terme de fluence, est très fréquemment évaluée via une mesure du nombre de mots correctement lus par minute. Or, cette mesure se résume à évaluer le décodage et l’automatisation. Mais a lecture fluente du lecteur expert ne se résume pas seulement à une vitesse de lecture élevée, elle se caractérise également par une prosodie adaptée au texte, notamment en termes de phrasé et d’expressivité. En omettant l’aspect prosodique de la fluence, on tend à entretenir une confusion entre fluence et vitesse de lecture. Les dimensions prosodiques de la fluence ont longtemps été négligées dans l’étude du développement de la lecture. Seules quelques études récentes se sont intéressées à leur développement dans diverses langues, mais il n’en existe aucune en français. Ces études ont pu montrer, d’une part un développement long qui se poursuit au-delà de l’enseignement primaire et d’autre part un lien bidirectionnel entre prosodie en lecture et compréhension écrite. La dimension prosodique de la fluence mérite d’être plus largement étudiée, notamment chez l’apprenti lecteur, et c’est l’objectif de cette thèse.Dans ce travail de thèse, nous avons étudié les étapes de l’acquisition de la prosodie en lecture, ainsi que le lien entre prosodie en lecture et compréhension écrite, chez de jeunes lecteurs français du début de l’école primaire au début de l’enseignement secondaire. Nous abordons ces questions en utilisant trois types de mesures complémentaires de la prosodie : une mesure subjective à l’aide d’une échelle multidimensionnelle et deux mesures objectives que sont les marqueurs acoustiques de phrasé et d’expressivité et une méthode d’évaluation automatique basé sur l’analyse des signaux de parole. Les lectures de 323 enfants du CE1 à la 5ème et d’une vingtaine d’adultes ont été enregistrées, 60 enfants ont été également été suivis du CE1 au CM1. Dans un premier temps, nous avons abordé le développement des compétences prosodiques en lecture d’un point de vue subjectif, en adaptant une échelle anglophone d’évaluation de la prosodie au français. Ces données subjectives ont permis de retrouver le lien prosodie-compréhension en français déjà mis en évidence dans d’autres langues. Dans un deuxième temps, ces données ont été analysées acoustiquement, afin de déterminer les étapes d’acquisition de la planification des pauses et de la respiration, marquant le phrasé pendant la lecture. L’étude des corrélations entre scores subjectifs et marqueurs acoustiques a permis de mettre en évidence les marqueurs affectant le jugement de l’auditeur. Les données acoustiques ont ensuite été utilisées pour mieux comprendre le lien entre prosodie et compréhension. Finalement, nous utilisons un outil de prédiction automatique des scores à l’échelle subjective, utilisant paramètres acoustiques et références multiples. Cet outil est utilisé pour analyser les données longitudinales recueillies auprès de 67 enfants du CE1 au CM1. Ces données ont permis de proposer un modèle de croissance pour chaque dimension de la fluence et étudier les liens de causalité entre automaticité, prosodie et compréhension. Les connaissances acquises dans cette thèse sur le développement de la prosodie en lecture et son lien avec la compréhension écrite chez l’enfant français nous permettent de proposer de nouveaux outils d’évaluation de la fluence incluant la prosodie, et d’envisager le développement d’outils d’entrainement à la lecture prosodique. Ces outils offrent de nouvelles perspectives pour l’enseignement de la lecture ainsi que pour le diagnostic et la prise en charge des enfants en difficulté d’apprentissage de la lecture.
... Hand gesture and speech are said to synchronize their activity on the level of prosody (Wagner, Malisz, & Kopp, 2014). Prosody, broadly defined, entails modulations in acoustics or body motions which are employed as special linguistic devices that serve what is uttered by way of how it is uttered -constraining pragmatic, syntactic, semantic, and affective dimensions of communication (McNeill, 2005;Prieto & Esteve-Gibert, 2018;Shattuck-Hufnagel & Ren, 2018;Wagner et al., 2014). ...
A well-known phenomenon of multimodal language is the synchronous coupling of prosodic contours in speech with salient kinematic changes in co-speech hand-gesture motions. Invariably, such coupling has been rendered by psychologists to require a dedicated neural-cognitive mechanism preplanning speech and gesture trajectories. Recently, in a continuous vocalization task, it was found that acoustic peaks unintentionally appear in vocalizations when gesture motions reach peaks in physical impetus, suggesting a biomechanical basis for gesture-speech synchrony (Pouw, Harrison, & Dixon, 2019). However, from this rudimentary study it is still difficult to draw strong conclusions about gesture-speech dynamics in (more) complex speech and the precise biomechanical nature of these effects. Here we assess how the timing of physical impetus of a gesture relates to its effect on acoustic parameters of mono-syllabic consonant-vowel (CV) vocalization(/pa/). Furthermore, we assess how chest-wall kinematics is affected by gesturing, and whether this modulates the effect of gestures on acoustics. In the current exploratory analysis, we analyze a subset (N = 4) of an already collected dataset (N = 36), which serves as the basis for a pre-registration of the confirmatory analyses yet to be completed. Here we provide exploratory evidence that gestures affect acoustics (amplitude envelope and F0) as well as chest-wall kinematics during mono-syllabic vocalizations. These effects are more extreme when a gesture’s peak impetus occurs closer to the center of the vowel vocalization event. If the current findings can be replicated in confirmatory fashion, there is a more compelling case to be made that gesture-speech physics is important facet of multimodal synchrony.
... The motherese used with infants eases the acquisition process (Nelson et al., 1989;Harris, 2013). In turn, infants' babbling is also coloured by their native language prosody, even before they utter their first sentences (de Boysson- Bardies et al., 1984;Prieto and Esteve-Gibert, 2018). The development of prosody continues until early adolescence, e.g. ...
The present work reviews the current knowledge of the development of reading prosody, or reading aloud with expression, in young children. Prosody comprises the variables of timing, phrasing, emphasis and intonation that speakers use to convey meaning. We detail the subjective rating scales proposed as a means of assessing performance in young readers and the objective features of each as markers of progress. Finally, we review studies that have explored the intricate relations between automaticity, prosody and comprehension.
... Furrow, 1984;Hornby & Hass, 1970), according to the literature other pragmatic uses of intonation are in place only later in development, due to cognitive and social constraints. For example, expression of belief states or politeness involve more complex cognitive skills and thus have been found to develop only after age three (Esteve-Gibert & Prieto, 2018). However, thus far no research has explored whether and how children use prosody as they develop an ability to express politeness, and also whether prosody might work as a facilitating device in that process. ...
Gesture and prosody are considered to be important precursors in early language development. In the present study, we ask whether those cues play a similar role later in children's acquisition of more complex pragmatic skills, such as politeness. 64 three- to five-year-old Catalan-dominant children participated in a request production task in four different conditions. They were prompted to request an object from either a classmate or an unfamiliar adult experimenter, with the implied cost of the request to the receiver's face thus being either high or low. Results showed that these preschool-age children used mitigating prosodic and gestural strategies to encode politeness earlier and more often than they used lexical or morphosyntactic markers, and that those cues develop incrementally during the preschool years. These findings suggest that prosody, gesture, and other body signals are an essential first step in the development of children's socio-pragmatic competence.
Prosody is crucial for resolving phrasal ambiguities. Recent research suggests that gestures can enhance this process, which may be especially useful for children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), who have impaired structural language. This study investigates how children with DLD use prosodic and gestural cues to interpret phrasal ambiguities. Catalan-speaking children with and without DLD heard sentences with two possible interpretations, a high (less common) and low (more common) attachment interpretation of the verb clause. Sentences were presented in three conditions: baseline (no cues to high-attachment interpretation), prosody-only (prosodic cues to high-attachment interpretation), and multimodal (prosodic and gestural cues to high-attachment interpretation). Offline target selection and online gaze patterns were analysed across linguistic (DLD vs. TD) and age groups (5–7 vs. 8–10 years old) to see if multimodal cues facilitate the processing of the less frequent high-attachment interpretation. The offline results revealed that prosodic cues influenced all children’s comprehension of phrasal structures and that gestures provided no benefit beyond prosody. Online data showed that children with DLD struggled to integrate visual information. Our findings underscore that children with DLD can rely on prosodic cues to support sentence comprehension and highlight the importance of integrating multimodal cues in linguistic interactions.
Intonation is one of the most important prosodic processes in spoken language, involving a wide range of variables and semantic-expressive potential. It is the direct manifestation of pitch changes (level, shape and direction) throughout the sentence; its main acoustic parameter is the fundamental frequency (f0), including all its components such as pitch range, scaling, or alignment between segments and tonal events. In speech, the intonation fulfils a number of functions, some of which are clearly linguistic in nature, such as the realisation of the modality or information structure of utterances, others are pragmatic or even emotional in nature. This includes the transmission of affective and attitudinal meanings, but also the possibility for intonation to convey all those indirect contents that allow the utterance to be better adapted to the communicative context, also expressing (im)politeness, irony, falsehood, etc.
Despite this apparent complexity, brought about by a combination of functions and meanings, intonation has an early development. Prosodic manifestations emerge in infants before the onset of the speech, triggering a kind of order of precedence over segmental production (Snow & Balog, 2002). This is evidenced by the ability of newborns to modulate their crying from the first few months of life, and subsequently by the first syllabic formations they produce. For this reason, according to the implicational principles of language acquisition, prosodic phenomenology, as a precocious component, is also one of the linguistic domains most resistant to control in adult second language acquisition.
patterns of utterance stress in discourse direct attention to specific themes and reactions, controlling the flow and coherence of conversation. this study examines the utterance stress in Steve Harvey's selected episodes from a phono-stylistic perspective. this study is hoped to improve understanding of linguistic mechanism in talk show communication, highlighting the importance of phonetic features in transmitting meaning and increasing broadcast conversation participation. the researcher concentrates on the types of focus functions of utterance stress of some episodes available on YouTube. to conduct the analysis, the researcher adopts (Carr, 2013; Davenport& Hannahs 2005) to analyze utterance stress and Leech and Short (2007) to examine the stylistic features of the data selected. based on the adopted model, the study concludes: the study utilizes utterance stress, focus and content. while stylistic features include syntax, vocabulary, narrative viewpoint, politeness, impoliteness and cultural references.
The article deals with the prosodic competence of learners of German, and more precisely with prosodic units. It is not always easy for learners to correctly determine these units and consequently to set correct sentence accents. Lack of correspondence between prosodic and syntactic units leads sometimes to prosodic errors. The article tries to analyze these discrepancies between prosodic units and syntactic phrases in order to determine certain regularities.
This dissertation investigated the effects of the Optimized Prosodic Approach for improving Vietnamese EFL learners’ listening ability as well as their working memory capacity. This approach was developed on the basis of the underlying principles of a theory of language learning proposed by Lian and Sussex (2018), a theory of perception – verbotonalism, a theory of selective attention, and the latest empirical evidence in lateralization related to language learning. At the same time, this research also examined the relationship between listening ability, working memory, and vocabulary knowledge. Besides, students’ opinions about this approach were also explored. The study employed a mixed-methods approach within a quasi-experimental design. Two intact classes, 65 second-year non-English major students in a college in Ho Chi Minh City participated in the study. One class was randomly assigned as the experimental group and the other as the control group. For 10 weeks, while the control groups were taught listening in a traditional, teach-led, and classroom-based approach, the experimental group practiced listening with the OPA embedded in a self-regulated online listening platform.
Results of T-tests analysis indicate that the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group in their listening performances. This finding underlines the value of prioritizing prosody by using the techniques developed in the study such as listening to low-pass filtered audio, repetition in synchrony with body movements, and shadowing to enhance listening comprehension. Regarding working memory, the experimental group achieved scores significantly higher than those of the control groups, suggesting that practicing with the OPA had a positive effect on how the students managed and processed auditory signals, reflecting the neuroplasticity of the working memory or the efficiency gains from working memory training. However, the improvement was observable only in the visual memory tasks and the auditory simple memory tasks, indicating that different modalities of presentation mode can have a different bearing on how learners manipulate stimuli. Furthermore, correlational analysis shows that listening ability was significantly correlated with vocabulary knowledge at a moderate level. A moderate connection between listening ability and working memory was also detected in the case of more skilled listeners (or the experimental group). Data analysis from the questionnaire, semi-structured interviews, students’ journals, and observation reveal that after 10 weeks’ intervention, the experimental group had positive opinions about this approach in terms of its effectiveness and its efficiency. Their general belief was that as a result of the practice with the OPA, they could improve their listening comprehension, their pronunciation, their vocabulary knowledge, and their working memory. They all agreed that this approach could develop their learning autonomy and offered a self-paced listening practice. Therefore, there was a consensus among students that the OPA had the potential to be widely implemented in listening teaching.
Overall, the results of this thesis offer not only insights into the nature of the listening process from a perceptual perspective, but also an alternative approach, that is the OPA, for improving EFL learners’ listening ability. The findings also make significant theoretical contributions to the field of language learning and teaching, prompting the rethinking of the current approaches to the teaching of listening.
Background:
The role of prosody in language acquisition and effective communication is documented in research. Nevertheless, rehabilitation of prosodic skills in children with hearing impairment using hearing aids or cochlear implants is relatively neglected compared to other speech and language areas.
Objective:
To detect the effect of prosodic rehabilitation using the adapted translated version of the "Prosody Treatment Program" on expression of prosodic features in Egyptian Arabic-speaking hearing-impaired school-age children fitted with hearing aids or cochlear implant devices in comparison to conventional auditory and language rehabilitation.
Methods:
This study was conducted on 34 children with sensorineural hearing loss in a randomized controlled trial design. Children were randomly divided into 2 groups, group A (cases) and group B (control), by block randomization. Both groups were initially evaluated for their prosodic skills using objective measures. Group A received rehabilitation for prosody using the Prosody Treatment Program for 1 h, once per week for 3 months, while group B received conventional auditory and language training and served as their control. Both groups were re-evaluated using the same protocol after 3 months of therapy.
Results:
A statistically significant improvement of most of the assessed prosodic parameters in group A was shown when comparing the pretherapy and posttherapy scores, as well as comparing between both studied groups after therapy.
Conclusions:
Prosody is amenable to motor learning. The Prosody Treatment Program seems to be an effective rehabilitation tool in improving some prosodic skills of hearing-impaired children. Prosodic rehabilitation showed superiority to conventional auditory and language training in improving the expression of some prosodic features and pragmatic language skills.
The world in which we live is filled with sensory experiences. Language provides us with a manner in which to communicate these experiences with one another. In order to partake in this communication, it is necessary to acquire labels for things we see, hear, feel, smell, and taste. Much is known about how we learn words for things we can see, but this bias in the literature leaves many open questions about words attributed to other modalities. This cumulative dissertation aims to close this gap by investigating how both 10- to-12-month old infants and adults map novel pseudowords onto environmental sounds in an auditory associative word learning task with the aim to explore how humans learn words for things that cannot be seen, such as thunder, siren, and, lullaby. Infants were found, via event-related potentials (ERPs), to be successful at auditory associative word learning, while adults are much stronger learners in multimodal audio-visual conditions. Across the lifespan, sensory modality was found to affect word learning differently in infants than in adults. Where infants benefitted from unimodal auditory word learning, adults were more successful in multimodal audiovisual paradigms. Furthermore, the modality of the object being labelled modulated the temporal onset and the topological distribution of the N400 ERP component of violated lexical-semantic expectation. Lastly, the temporal congruency of presented stimuli affected word learning in adults in an inverted manner to other forms of statistical learning. Word learning is sensitive to age, modality, and means of presentation, providing evidence for various intertwined learning mechanisms and bringing us a step closer towards understanding human linguistic cognition.
Diversos estudios señalan que la prosodia, o el subsistema de la fonología que abarca las características rítmicas y melódicas del lenguaje, es un aspecto clave para el procesamiento del lenguaje. De ahí que los últimos estudios se centren en los déficits en éste ámbito en los niños con trastorno del desarrollo del lenguaje (TDL). No obstante, los hallazgos de investigación reportados son contradictorios, y en el caso del español los estudios son muy escasos. El objetivo de este estudio de caso es analizar el perfil de habilidades prosódicas, receptivas y expresivas, a través de una batería completa de prosodia y de una tarea de conciencia del acento léxico de un alumno con TDL. Este alumno tiene 8 años de edad y pertenece a un nivel socio-económico medio. Su rendimiento se comparó con el de un participante control de la misma edad cronológica y nivel socioeconómico, pero sin dificultades. Además, se evaluaron las habilidades de inteligencia verbal y no verbal, diversas habilidades lingüísticas, así como las habilidades lectoras. Los resultados muestran que el participante con TDL presenta dificultades en algunas habilidades prosódicas (Final de turno receptivo, Foco expresivo y en las tareas de Forma a nivel de palabra y de sintagma). Se discuten las implicaciones de los resultados obtenidos de esta investigación cualitativa sobre la importancia de considerar las habilidades prosódicas en la evaluación del TDL. Futuros estudios con una muestra mayor son necesarios para corroborar estos hallazgos y seguir analizando el papel de la prosodia en el TDL en español.
Speech rhythm is considered one of the first windows into the native language, and the taxonomy of rhythm classes is commonly used to explain early language discrimination. Relying on formal rhythm classification is problematic for two reasons. First, it is not known to which extent infants' sensitivity to language variation is attributable to rhythm alone, and second, it is not known how infants discriminate languages not classified in any of the putative rhythm classes. Employing a central-fixation preference paradigm with natural stimuli, this study tested whether infants differentially attend to native versus nonnative varieties that differ only in temporal rhythm cues, and both of which are rhythmically unclassified. An analysis of total looking time did not detect any rhythm preferences at any age. First-look duration, arguably more closely reflecting infants' underlying perceptual sensitivities, indicated age-specific preferences for native versus non-native rhythm: 4-month-olds seemed to prefer the native-, and 6-month-olds the non-native language-variety. These findings suggest that infants indeed acquire native rhythm cues rather early, by the 4th month, supporting the theory that rhythm can bootstrap further language development. Our data on infants' processing of rhythmically unclassified languages suggest that formal rhythm classification does not determine infants' ability to discriminate language varieties.
This work presents an analysis of the intonation competence in a group of Italian children with cochlear implant (CI). Early cochlear implantation plays a crucial role in language development for children who were born deaf in that it favours the acquisition of complex aspects of language, such as the intonation structure. A story-generation task, the Narrative Competence Task, was used to elicit children’s stories. Narrations produced by 8 early implanted children and by 16 children with typically hearing (TH) (8 one-to-one matched considering the chronological age, TH-CA, and 8 considering the hearing age, TH-HA) were analysed considering intonation features (pitch accent distribution, edge tones and inner breaks). Results show that children with CI produce intonation patterns that are similar to those of both TH-CA and TH-HA control groups. Few significant differences were found only between children with CI and children matched for TH-HA in the use of rising edge tones. These results are discussed in light of the role of cognitive development in using prosody and intonation and the importance of early CI implantation. This study shows for the first time that intonation use of early implanted children is not different from that of typically developing children with the same chronological age.
This study investigates the effectiveness of training preschoolers in order to enhance their social cognition and pragmatic skills. Eighty-three 3–4-year-olds were divided into three groups and listened to stories enriched with mental state terms. Then, whereas the control group engaged in non-reflective activities, the two experimental groups were guided by a trainer to reflect on mental states depicted in the stories. In one of these groups, the children were prompted to not only talk about these states but also “embody” them through prosodic and gestural cues. Results showed that while there were no significant effects on Theory of Mind, emotion understanding, and mental state verb comprehension, the experimental groups significantly improved their pragmatic skill scores pretest-to-posttest. These results suggest that interactional interventions can contribute to preschoolers’ pragmatic development, demonstrate the value of the new embodied training, and highlight the importance of multidimensional testing for the evaluation of intervention effects.
Els estudis sobre desenvolupament del llenguatge típicament s'han centrat en l'anàlisi de la parla. Tanmateix, hi ha altres elements comunicatius que són una peça fonamental en la comunicació i cognició humanes: els gestos. Aquests elements visuals estan íntimament integrats amb la parla des del punt de vista temporal i des del punt de vista semanticopragmàtic, i fan que es pugui parlar del llenguatge i la comunicació com uns fets multimodal. En aquest article posem a l'abast dels lectors un resum dels estudis més recents sobre adquisició del llenguatge des d'una perspectiva multimodal, tot i emfasitzant el rol dels gestos com a facilitadors i precursors del llenguatge no només en les etapes més primerenques sinó també en etapes de desenvolupament pragmàtic més tardà. Els estudis demostren que el gest és un component central de l'adquisició del llenguatge i que actua com a precursor i predictor de l’aprenentatge del vocabulari, de la sintaxi, així com del desenvolupament pragmàtic i discursiu. Finalment apuntem les àrees de recerca més actuals i innovadores i el possible impacte d'aquesta recerca en l'àmbit de la rehabilitació del llenguatge.
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