Developmental changes in the weighting of prosodic cues

Authors: Seidl, Amanda; Cristià, Alejandrina

Source: Developmental Science, Volume 11, Number 4, July 2008 , pp. 596-606(11)

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Abstract:

Previous research has shown that the weighting of, or attention to, acoustic cues at the level of the segment changes over the course of development ( Nittrouer & Miller, 1997 ; Nittrouer, Manning & Meyer, 1993 ). In this paper we examined changes over the course of development in weighting of acoustic cues at the suprasegmental level. Specifically, we tested English-learning 4-month-olds' performance on a clause segmentation task when each of three acoustic cues to clausal units was neutralized and contrasted it with performance on a Baseline condition where no cues were manipulated. Comparison with the reported performance of 6-month-olds on the same task ( Seidl, 2007 ) reveals that 4-month-olds weight prosodic cues to clausal boundaries differently than 6-month-olds, relying more heavily on all three correlates of clausal boundaries (pause, pitch and vowel duration) than 6-month-olds do, who rely primarily on pitch. We interpret this as evidence that 4-month-olds use a holistic processing strategy, while 6-month-olds may already be able to attend separately to isolated cues in the input stream and may, furthermore, be able to exploit a language-specific cue weighting. Thus, in a way similar to that in other cognitive domains, infants begin as holistic auditory scene processors and are only later able to process individual auditory cues.

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00704.x

Affiliations: 1: Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, Purdue University, USA

Publication date: 2008-07-01