TY  - JOUR
A1  - Holzgrefe-Lang, Julia
A1  - Wellmann, Caroline
A1  - Höhle, Barbara
A1  - Wartenburger, Isabell
T1  - Infants’ Processing of Prosodic Cues
T2  - Language and speech
N2  - Infants as young as six months are sensitive to prosodic phrase boundaries marked by three acoustic cues: pitch change, final lengthening, and pause. Behavioral studies suggest that a language-specific weighting of these cues develops during the first year of life; recent work on German revealed that eight-month-olds, unlike six-month-olds, are capable of perceiving a prosodic boundary on the basis of pitch change and final lengthening only. The present study uses Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to investigate the neuro-cognitive development of prosodic cue perception in German-learning infants. In adults’ ERPs, prosodic boundary perception is clearly reflected by the so-called Closure Positive Shift (CPS). To date, there is mixed evidence on whether an infant CPS exists that signals early prosodic cue perception, or whether the CPS emerges only later—the latter implying that infantile brain responses to prosodic boundaries reflect acoustic, low-level pause detection.

We presented six- and eight-month-olds with stimuli containing either no boundary cues, only a pitch cue, or a combination of both pitch change and final lengthening. For both age groups, responses to the former two conditions did not differ, while brain responses to prosodic boundaries cued by pitch change and final lengthening showed a positivity that we interpret as a CPS-like infant ERP component. This hints at an early sensitivity to prosodic boundaries that cannot exclusively be based on pause detection. Instead, infants’ brain responses indicate an early ability to exploit subtle, relational prosodic cues in speech perception—presumably even earlier than could be concluded from previous behavioral results.
KW  - Language acquisition
KW  - speech perception
KW  - event-related potentials
KW  - prosody processing
KW  - prosodic boundary cues
Y1  - 2017
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/53425
SN  - 0023-8309
SN  - 1756-6053
VL  - 61
IS  - 1
SP  - 153
EP  - 169
PB  - Sage Publ.
CY  - London
ER  -