Hostname: page-component-7b7567c8c-fvjsw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-15T09:28:47.474Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Prosody and the development of comprehension*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Anne Cutler and
David A. Swinney
Anne Cutler*
Affiliation:
MRC Applied Psychology Unit
David A. Swinney
Affiliation:
Tufts University
*
MRC Applied Psychology Unit, 15 Chaucer Road, Cambridge CB2 2EF, UK.
Get accessRights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Four studies are reported in which young children's response time to detect word targets was measured. Children under about six years of age did not show the response time advantage for accented target words which adult listeners show. When semantic focus of the target word was manipulated independently of accent, children of about five years of age showed an adult-like response time advantage for focussed targets, but children younger than five did not. It is argued that the processing advantage for accented words reflects the semantic role of accent as an expression of sentence focus. Processing advantages for accented words depend on the prior development of representations of sentence semantic structure, including the concept of focus. The previous literature on the development of prosodic competence shows an apparent anomaly in that young children's productive skills appear to outstrip their receptive skills; however, this anomaly disappears if very young children's prosody is assumed to be produced without an underlying representation of the relationship between prosody and semantics.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , February 1987, pp. 145 - 167
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

*

Experiments one to three were reported variously to the Midwestern Psychological Society in May 1979 and to the Fifth Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development in October 1980. These earlier experiments were supported by grants from the Science Research Council (UK) and the National Science Foundation. Experiment four was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Health.

The authors thank Judith Goodman, David Gow, and Scott Tucker for technical assistance. Particular thanks go to Penny Prather for invaluable help and useful discussion. Finally, very many thanks to Dwight Bolinger for constant encouragement and for stimulating a long-overdue written report of this work.

References

REFERENCES

Allen, G. D. (1983) Linguistic experience modifies lexical stress perception. Journal of Child Language 10. 535–49.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Allen, G. D. & Hawkins, S. (1978) The development of phonological rhythm. In Bell, A. and Hooper, J. B. (eds), Syllables and segments. Amsterdam: North Holland.Google Scholar
Atkinson-King, K. (1973) Children's acquisition of phonological stress contrasts. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 25.Google Scholar
Bates, E. (1974) The acquisition of pragmatic competence. Journal of Child Language 1, 277–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bates, E. (1976) Language and context: the acquisition of pragmatics. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Bolinger, D. L. (1978) Intonation across languages. In Greenberg, J. H. (ed.), Universals of human language. Vol. 2: Phonology. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Bates, E. (1982) Nondeclaratives from an intonational standpoint. In Papers from the parasession on non-declarative sentences of the eighteenth regional meeting. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.Google Scholar
Bates, E. (1983) Intonation and gesture. American Speech 58. 156–74.Google Scholar
Bosshardt, H. G. & Hörmann, H. (1982) Der Einfluss suprasegmentaler Information auf die Sprachwahrnehmung bei 4 – bis 6 jährigen Kindern. Archiv f¨r Psychologie 134. 81–104.Google Scholar
Brown, R. (1973) A first language: the early stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cowin, E., Mann, V., Schoenheimer, J. & Berman, J. (1984) Age-related changes in the syntactic interpretation of prosodic cues. Paper presented to the 108th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cruttenden, A. (1974) An experiment involving comprehension of intonation in children from 7 to 10. Journal of Child Language 1. 221–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cruttenden, A. (1985) Intonation comprehension in ten-year-olds. Journal of Child Language 12. 643–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cutler, A. (1976) Phoneme-monitoring reaction time as a function of preceding intonation contour. Perception and Psychophysics 20. 55–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cutler, A. & Fodor, J. A. (1979) Semantic focus and sentence comprehension. Cognition 7. 49–59.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cutler, A. & Foss, D. J. (1977) On the role of sentence stress in sentence processing. Language and Speech 20. 1–10.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Foss, D. J., Bias, R. & Starkey, P. (1978) Sentence comprehension processes in the pre-schooler. In Campbell, R. and Smith, P. T. (eds), Recent advances in the psychology of language. New York: Plenum.Google Scholar
Furrow, D. (1984) Young children's use of prosody. Journal of Child Language 11. 203–13.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
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. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Hornby, P. A. (1971) Surface structure and the topic-comment distinction: a developmental study. Child Development 42, 1975–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hornby, P. A. & Hass, W. A. (1970) Use of contrastive stress by preschool children. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 13. 395–9.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1979) A functional approach to child language. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Klein, H. B. (1984) Learning to stress: a case study. Journal of Child Language 11. 375–90.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lahey, M. (1974) Use of prosody and syntactic markers in children's comprehension of spoken sentences. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 17. 656–68.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
MacWhinney, B. & Bates, E. (1978) Sentential devices for conveying givenness and newness: a cross-cultural developmental study. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour 17. 539–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacWhinney, B., Pleh, C. & Bates, E. L. (1985) The development of sentence interpretation in Hungarian. Cognitive Psychology 17. 178–209.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacWhinney, B. & Price, D. (1980). The development of the comprehension of topic-comment marking. In Ingram, D., Peng, F. & Dale, P. (eds), Proceedings of the first international congress for the study of child language. Lanham MD: University Press of America.Google Scholar
Mehler, J. & Bertoncini, J. (1979) Infants' perception of speech and other acoustic stimuli. In Morton, J. & Marshall, J. (eds), Structures and processes (Psycholinguistics series 2). London: Elek.Google Scholar
Miller, W. & Ervin, S. (1964) The development of grammar in child language. In U. Bellugi and R. Brown (eds), The acquisition of language. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 29. No. 92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morse, P. A. (1972) The discrimination of speech and nonspeech stimuli in early infancy. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 14. 477–92.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Paul, R. (1985) The emergence of pragmatic comprehension: a study of children's understanding of sentence-structure cues to given/new information. Journal of Child Language 12. 161–79.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rudnicky, A. (1980) Structure and familiarity in the organisation of speech perception. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Carnegie-Mellon University.Google Scholar
Scholes, R. J., Tanis, D. C. & Turner, A. (1976) Syntactic and strategic aspects of the comprehension of indirect and direct object constructions by children. Language and Speech 19. 212–23.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Smith, B. L. (1978) Temporal aspects of English speech production: a developmental perspective. Journal of Phonetics 6. 37–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Solan, L. (1980) Contrastive stress and children's interpretation of pronouns. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 23. 688–98.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Swinney, D. A., Zurif, E. B. & Cutler, A. (1980) Effects of sentential stress and word class upon comprehension in Broca's aphasics. Brain and Language 10. 132–44.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tonkova-Yampol'skaya, R. (1973) Development of speech intonation in infants during the first two years of life. In Ferguson, C. A. and Slobin, D. I. (ed), Studies of child language development. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.Google Scholar
Tyler, L. K. & Marslen-Wilson, W. D. (1978) Some developmental aspects of sentence processing and memory. Journal of Child Language 5. 113–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tyler, L. K. & Marslen-Wilson, W. D. (1981) Children's processing of spoken language. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour 20. 400–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wieman, L. (1976) Stress patterns in early child language. Journal of Child Language 3. 283–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar