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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.
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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.

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

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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

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