1
|
Strand BMS. Playing With Fire Compounds: The Tonal Accents of Compounds in (North) Norwegian Preschoolers' Role-Play Register. LANGUAGE AND SPEECH 2024; 67:113-139. [PMID: 37113109 PMCID: PMC11420583 DOI: 10.1177/00238309231161289] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/19/2023]
Abstract
Prosodic features are some of the most salient features of dialect variation in Norway. It is therefore no wonder that the switch in prosodic systems is what is first recognized by caretakers and scholars when Norwegian children code-switch to something resembling the dialect of the capital (henceforth Urban East Norwegian, UEN) in role-play. With a focus on the system of lexical tonal accents, this paper investigates the spontaneous speech of North Norwegian children engaging in peer social role-play. By investigating F0 contours extracted from a corpus of spontaneous peer play, and comparing them with elicited baseline reference contours, this paper makes the case that children fail to apply the target tonal accent consistent with UEN in compounds in role-play, although the production of tonal accents otherwise seems to be phonetically target like UEN. Put in other words, they perform in accordance with UEN phonetics, but not UEN morpho-phonology.
Collapse
|
2
|
Kolberg L, de Carvalho A, Babineau M, Havron N, Fiévet AC, Abaurre B, Christophe A. "The tiger is hitting! the duck too!" 3-year-olds can use prosodic information to constrain their interpretation of ellipsis. Cognition 2021; 213:104626. [PMID: 33593594 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104626] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/31/2020] [Revised: 01/07/2021] [Accepted: 02/04/2021] [Indexed: 11/19/2022]
Abstract
This work aims to investigate French children's ability to use phrasal boundaries for disambiguation of a type of ambiguity not yet studied, namely stripping sentences versus simple transitive sentences. We used stripping sentences such as "[Le tigre tape]! [Le canard aussi]!" ("[The tiger is hitting]! [The duck too]!", in which both the tiger and the duck are hitting), which, without the prosodic information, would be ambiguous with a transitive sentence such as "[Le tigre] [tape le canard aussi]!" ("[The tiger] [is hitting the duck too]!", in which the tiger is hitting the duck). We presented 3-to-4-year-olds and 28-month-olds with one of the two types of sentence above, while they watched two videos side-by-side on a screen: one depicting the transitive interpretation of the sentences, and another depicting the stripping interpretation. The stripping interpretation video showed the two characters as agents of the named action (e.g. a duck and a tiger hitting a bunny), and the transitive interpretation video showed only the first character as an agent, and the second character as a patient of the action (e.g. the tiger hitting the duck and the bunny). The results showed that 3-to-4-year-olds use prosodic information to correctly distinguish stripping sentences from transitive sentences, as they looked significantly more at the appropriate video, while 28-month-olds show only a trend in the same direction. While recent studies demonstrated that from 18 months of age, infants are able to use phrasal prosody to guide the syntactic analysis of ambiguous sentences, our results show that only 3-to-4-year-olds were able to reliably use phrasal prosody to constrain the parsing of stripping sentences. We discuss several factors that can explain this delay, such as differences in the frequency of these structures in child-directed speech, as well as in the complexity of the sentences and of the experimental task. Our findings add to the growing body of evidence on the role of prosody in constraining parsing in young children.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Letícia Kolberg
- Departamento de Linguística, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Campinas, Brazil.
| | - Alex de Carvalho
- Laboratoire de Psychologie du Développement et de l'Éducation de l'Enfant (LaPsyDÉ), Department of Psychology, UniversitÉ de Paris, CNRS, F-75005 Paris, France
| | - Mireille Babineau
- Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, DEC-ENS/EHESS/CNRS, Ecole Normale Supérieure, PSL University, Paris, France; Maternité Port-Royal, AP-HP, Université Paris Descartes, France
| | - Naomi Havron
- Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, DEC-ENS/EHESS/CNRS, Ecole Normale Supérieure, PSL University, Paris, France; University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel
| | - Anne-Caroline Fiévet
- Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, DEC-ENS/EHESS/CNRS, Ecole Normale Supérieure, PSL University, Paris, France; Maternité Port-Royal, AP-HP, Université Paris Descartes, France
| | - Bernadete Abaurre
- Departamento de Linguística, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Campinas, Brazil
| | - Anne Christophe
- Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, DEC-ENS/EHESS/CNRS, Ecole Normale Supérieure, PSL University, Paris, France; Maternité Port-Royal, AP-HP, Université Paris Descartes, France
| |
Collapse
|
3
|
Best CT. The Diversity of Tone Languages and the Roles of Pitch Variation in Non-tone Languages: Considerations for Tone Perception Research. Front Psychol 2019; 10:364. [PMID: 30863341 PMCID: PMC6399451 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00364] [Citation(s) in RCA: 14] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/03/2018] [Accepted: 02/05/2019] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
Affiliation(s)
- Catherine T Best
- MARCS Institute, Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW, Australia
| |
Collapse
|
4
|
Ota M, Yamane N, Mazuka R. The Effects of Lexical Pitch Accent on Infant Word Recognition in Japanese. Front Psychol 2018; 8:2354. [PMID: 29375452 PMCID: PMC5770359 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02354] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/30/2017] [Accepted: 12/26/2017] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
Abstract
Learners of lexical tone languages (e.g., Mandarin) develop sensitivity to tonal contrasts and recognize pitch-matched, but not pitch-mismatched, familiar words by 11 months. Learners of non-tone languages (e.g., English) also show a tendency to treat pitch patterns as lexically contrastive up to about 18 months. In this study, we examined if this early-developing capacity to lexically encode pitch variations enables infants to acquire a pitch accent system, in which pitch-based lexical contrasts are obscured by the interaction of lexical and non-lexical (i.e., intonational) features. Eighteen 17-month-olds learning Tokyo Japanese were tested on their recognition of familiar words with the expected pitch or the lexically opposite pitch pattern. In early trials, infants were faster in shifting their eyegaze from the distractor object to the target object than in shifting from the target to distractor in the pitch-matched condition. In later trials, however, infants showed faster distractor-to-target than target-to-distractor shifts in both the pitch-matched and pitch-mismatched conditions. We interpret these results to mean that, in a pitch-accent system, the ability to use pitch variations to recognize words is still in a nascent state at 17 months.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Mitsuhiko Ota
- School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
| | - Naoto Yamane
- Laboratory for Language Development, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Wako, Japan
| | - Reiko Mazuka
- Laboratory for Language Development, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Wako, Japan
- Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, NC, United States
| |
Collapse
|