Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T20:23:51.120Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 October 2008

MELANIE SODERSTROM ,
MEGAN BLOSSOM ,
RINA FOYGEL  and
JAMES L. MORGAN
MELANIE SODERSTROM*
Affiliation:
Brown University
MEGAN BLOSSOM
Affiliation:
University of Kansas
RINA FOYGEL
Affiliation:
Brown University
JAMES L. MORGAN
Affiliation:
Brown University
*
Address for correspondence: Melanie Soderstrom, University of Manitoba, Department of Psychology, P404 Duff Roblin Building, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3T 2N2, Canada.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 35 , Issue 4 , November 2008 , pp. 869 - 902
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press

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

[*]

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.

References

REFERENCES

Barker, B. A. & Newman, R. S. (2004). Listen to your mother! The role of talker familiarity in infant streaming. Cognition 94, B45–B53.Google Scholar
Bernstein, Ratner N. (1986). Durational cues which mark clause boundaries in mother–child speech. Phonetics 14, 303–309.Google Scholar
Blauww, E. (1994). The contribution of prosodic boundary markers to the perceptual difference between read and spontaneous speech. Speech Communication 14, 359–75.Google Scholar
Boersma, P. (2001). Praat, a system for doing phonetics by computer. Glot International 5, 341–45.Google Scholar
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.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brent, M. R. & Siskind, J. M. (2001). The role of exposure to isolated words in early vocabulary development. Cognition 81, B33–B44.Google Scholar
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.Google Scholar
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.Google Scholar
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.Google Scholar
Fisher, C. & Tokura, H. (1996 a). Acoustic cues to grammatical structure in infant-directed speech: Cross-linguistic evidence. Child Development 67, 3192–218.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
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.Google Scholar
Furrow, D., Nelson, K. & Benedict, H. (1979). Mothers' speech to children and syntactic development: some simple relationships. Journal of Child Language 6, 423–42.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gee, J. P. & Grosjean, F. (1983). Performance structures: A psycholinguistic and linguistic appraisal. Cognitive Psychology 15, 411–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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.Google Scholar
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.Google Scholar
Jusczyk, P. W. (1998). Constraining the search for structure in the input. Lingua 106, 197–218.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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.Google Scholar
Kaye, K. (1980). Why we don't talk ‘baby talk’ to babies. Journal of Child Language 7, 489–507.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Klatt, D. H. (1975). Vowel lengthening is syntactically determined in a connected discourse. Journal of Phonetics 3, 129–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES Project: Tools for analyzing talk, 3rd ed. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
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.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Morgan, J. L. (1986). From simple input to complex grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
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.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nelson, K. (1973). Structure and strategy in learning to talk. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 38, 1–135.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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.Google Scholar
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.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Phillips, J. R. (1973). Syntax and vocabulary of mothers' speech to young children: Age and sex comparisons. Child Development 44, 182–85.Google Scholar
Pinker, S. (1994). Language learnability and language development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
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.Google Scholar
Shady, M. (1996). Infants' sensitivity to function morphemes. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, State University of New York, Buffalo.Google Scholar
Sherrod, K. B., Friedman, S., Crawley, S., Drake, D. & Devieux, J. (1977). Maternal language to prelinguistic infants: syntactic aspects. Child Development 48, 1662–65.Google Scholar
Snow, C. E. (1977). The development of conversation between mothers and babies. Journal of Child Language 4, 1–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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.Google Scholar
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.Google Scholar
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.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Stern, D. N., Spieker, S. & MacKain, K. (1982). Intonation contours as signals in maternal speech to prelinguistic infants. Developmental Psychology 18, 727–35.Google Scholar
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.Google Scholar
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.Google Scholar
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.CrossRefGoogle Scholar