Prosodic differences between declaratives and interrogatives in infant-directed speech

• Published in: Journal of child language 2017-07, Vol.44 (4), p.968-994
• Main Authors: GEFFEN, SUSAN, MINTZ, TOBEN H.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adult; Adults; American English; Child-directed speech; Colleges & universities; Cues; English; Female; Grammar; Humans; Infant; Infants; Information sources; Interpersonal Communication; Language; Language acquisition; Language Development; Learning; Male; Maternal Behavior; Mother-Child Relations; Mothers; North American English; Nouns; Phonology; Pitch; Principal components analysis; Prosody; Questions; Sentences; Speech; Speech Communication; Speech duration; Speech Perception; Stimuli; Suprasegmentals; Syllables; Syntax; Verbs; Wh phrases; Word Order; Young Children
• ISSN: 0305-0009; 1469-7602
• DOI: 10.1017/S0305000916000349

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.