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Prosodic differences between declaratives and interrogatives in infant-directed speech*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2016

SUSAN GEFFEN  and
TOBEN H. MINTZ
SUSAN GEFFEN*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Southern California
TOBEN H. MINTZ
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, and Department of Linguistics, University of Southern California
*
Address for correspondence: Susan Geffen, PhD, Department of Psychology, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada. e-mail: susan.geffen@ucalgary.ca
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Abstract

In many languages, declaratives and interrogatives differ in word order properties, and in syntactic organization more broadly. Thus, in order to learn the distinct syntactic properties of the two sentence types, learners must first be able to distinguish them using non-syntactic information. Prosodic information is often assumed to be a useful basis for this type of discrimination, although no systematic studies of the prosodic cues available to infants have been reported. Analysis of maternal speech in three Standard American English-speaking mother–infant dyads found that polar interrogatives differed from declaratives on the patterning of pitch and duration on the final two syllables, but wh-questions did not. Thus, while prosody is unlikely to aid discrimination of declaratives from wh-questions, infant-directed speech provides prosodic information that infants could use to distinguish declaratives and polar interrogatives. We discuss how learners could leverage this information to identify all question forms, in the context of syntax acquisition.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 44 , Issue 4 , July 2017 , pp. 968 - 994
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

[*]

We would like to thank the members of the USC Language Development Lab for their help with this research as well as the families that participated in this study. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. BCS-1227074 awarded to T. Mintz and S. Geffen. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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