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Lexical and prosodic eues in the comprehension of relative certainty*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Chris Moore ,
Lisa Harris  and
Maria Patriquin
Chris Moore*
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University
Lisa Harris
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University
Maria Patriquin
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University
*
Department of Psychology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, B3H 4J1, Canada.
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Abstract

This study examined the development of children's comprehension of the use of intonation and belief verbs to mark the relative certainty with which a speaker makes a statement. Subjects were presented with a task in which they had to guess the location of an object hidden in one of two boxes over a series of trials. As clues to location, the children were presented with contrasting pairs of statements by two puppets. In the first experiment with 30 children at each of three, four, five and six years of age, statements in each pair differed either with respect to the belief term included – know, think or guess – or with respect to terminal pitch contour – rising or falling. Results showed that three-year-olds did not use any information reliably to determine the location of the object, four-year-olds treated falling pitch as a more reliable indicator of location than rising pitch, and older children responded on the basis of the belief terms but not on the basis of prosody. In Experiment 2, 40 children at each of three, four and five years heard statements which differed with respect to both belief verbs and prosody. In one condition falling intonation was paired with the more certain belief term in each pair, and rising intonation with the less certain pair. In a second condition, the pairings were reversed. Results showed that, while four-year-olds could tell the difference between know and think, they could not use intonation information to determine the location. Five-year-olds used both lexical and prosodic information, with prosodic eues modulating the effects of lexical. Taken together, these experiments show that prosodic and lexical cues start to be used by children to interpret relative speaker certainty at about the same time developmentally, but that lexical cues initially appear to dominate while prosodic ones modulate their effects. Finally, it is argued that children's understanding of prosody will be best revealed in contexts in which they are required to respond to the pragmatic function of verbal stimuli rather than to the lexical content.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , February 1993 , pp. 153 - 167
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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Footnotes

[*]

This work was supported by an operating grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (No. OGP0041243) to the first author. The authors would like to thank the staff and children of the many preschools and schools which participated in this research. We are grateful to Lorraine Chiasson for her assistance and to Nameera Akhtar and David Furrow for advice. We also thank two anonymous reviewers of the first draft and especially the editor for a number of suggestions for improvements to the paper.

References

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