Prosody and the development of comprehension

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 inde...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of child language 1987-02, Vol.14 (1), p.145-167
Main Authors: Cutler, Anne, Swinney, David A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biological and medical sciences
Child
Child development
Child, Preschool
Communication disorders
Developmental psychology
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Humans
Language Development
Phonetics
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Reaction Time
Semantics
Speech Perception
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Summary: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.
ISSN:0305-0009
1469-7602
DOI:10.1017/S0305000900012782