TY - JOUR A1 - Wellmann, Caroline A1 - Holzgrefe-Lang, Julia A1 - Truckenbrodt, Hubert A1 - Wartenburger, Isabell A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - How each prosodic boundary cue matters evidence from German infants JF - Frontiers in psychology N2 - Previous studies have revealed that infants aged 6-10 months are able to use the acoustic correlates of major prosodic boundaries, that is, pitch change, preboundary lengthening, and pause, for the segmentation of the continuous speech signal. Moreover, investigations with American-English- and Dutch-learning infants suggest that processing prosodic boundary markings involves a weighting of these cues. This weighting seems to develop with increasing exposure to the native language and to underlie crosslinguistic variation. In the following, we report the results of four experiments using the headturn preference procedure to explore the perception of prosodic boundary cues in German infants. We presented 8-month-old infants with a sequence of names in two different prosodic groupings, with or without boundary markers. Infants discriminated both sequences when the boundary was marked by all three cues (Experiment 1) and when it was marked by a pitch change and preboundary lengthening in combination (Experiment 2). The presence of a pitch change (Experiment 3) or preboundary lengthening (Experiment 4) as single cues did not lead to a successful discrimination. Our results indicate that pause is not a necessary cue for German infants. Pitch change and preboundary lengthening in combination, but not as single cues, are sufficient. Hence, by 8 months infants only rely on a convergence of boundary markers. Comparisons with adults' performance on the same stimulus materials suggest that the pattern observed with the 8-month-olds is already consistent with that of adults. We discuss our findings with respect to crosslinguistic variation and the development of a language-specific prosodic cue weighting. KW - infants KW - language acquisition KW - speech perception KW - prosodic bootstrapping KW - prosodic boundary cues KW - cue weighting KW - intonation phrase boundary KW - headturn preference procedure Y1 - 2012 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00580 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 3 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Weissenborn, Jürgen A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Kiefer, D. A1 - Cavar, Damir T1 - On the Structure of early syntactic knowledge : continuity and Economy Y1 - 2000 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Watermeyer, Melanie A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Kauschke, Christina T1 - Ausagieren von Sätzen versus Satz-Bild-Zuordnung: Vergleich zweier Methoden zur Untersuchung des Sprachverständnisses anhand von semantisch reversiblen Sätzen mit Objektvoranstellung bei drei- und fünfjährigen Kindern Y1 - 2011 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - van Ommen, Sandrien A1 - Boll-Avetisyan, Natalie A1 - Larraza, Saioa A1 - Wellmann, Caroline A1 - Bijeljac-Babic, Ranka A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Nazzi, Thierry T1 - Language-specific prosodic acquisition BT - a comparison of phrase boundary perception by French- and German-learning infants JF - Journal of memory and language: JML N2 - This study compares the development of prosodic processing in French- and German-learning infants. The emergence of language-specific perception of phrase boundaries was directly tested using the same stimuli across these two languages. French-learning (Experiment 1, 2) and German-learning 6- and 8-month-olds (Experiment 3) listened to the same French noun sequences with or without major prosodic boundaries ([Loulou et Manou] [et Nina]; [Loulou et Manou et Nina], respectively). The boundaries were either naturally cued (Experiment 1), or cued exclusively by pitch and duration (Experiment 2, 3). French-learning 6- and 8-month-olds both perceived the natural boundary, but neither perceived the boundary when only two cues were present. In contrast, German-learning infants develop from not perceiving the two-cue boundary at 6 months to perceiving it at 8 months, just like German-learning 8-month-olds listening to German (Wellmann, Holzgrefe, Truckenbrodt, Wartenburger, & Hohle, 2012). In a control experiment (Experiment 4), we found little difference between German and French adult listeners, suggesting that later, French listeners catch up with German listeners. Taken together, these cross-linguistic differences in the perception of identical stimuli provide direct evidence for language-specific development of prosodic boundary perception. KW - Prosody KW - Acquisition KW - Language-specific KW - Perception KW - Infant KW - Prosodic boundaries Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2020.104108 SN - 0749-596X SN - 1096-0821 VL - 112 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - van Kampen, Anja A1 - Parmaksiz, Güliz A1 - van de Vijver, Ruben A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - Metrical and statistical cues for word segmentation : the use of vowel harmony and word stress as a cue to word boundaries by 6- and 9-month-old Turkish learners Y1 - 2008 SN - 978-1-8471-8618-8 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - van de Vijver, Ruben A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Ott, Susan T1 - On the distribution of dorsals in complex and simple onsets in child German, Dutch and English Y1 - 2009 SN - 978-3-11-021931-9 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Tamasi, Katalin A1 - Mckean, Cristina A1 - Gafos, Adamantios I. A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - Children's gradient sensitivity to phonological mismatch BT - Considering the dynamics of looking behavior and pupil dilation JF - Journal of child language N2 - In a preferential looking paradigm, we studied how children's looking behavior and pupillary response were modulated by the degree of phonological mismatch between the correct label of a target referent and its manipulated form. We manipulated degree of mismatch by introducing one or more featural changes to the target label. Both looking behavior and pupillary response were sensitive to degree of mismatch, corroborating previous studies that found differential responses in one or the other measure. Using time-course analyses, we present for the first time results demonstrating full separability among conditions (detecting difference not only between one vs. more, but also between two and three featural changes). Furthermore, the correct labels and small featural changes were associated with stable target preference, while large featural changes were associated with oscillating looking behavior, suggesting significant shifts in looking preference over time. These findings further support and extend the notion that early words are represented in great detail, containing subphonemic information. KW - lexical development KW - featural distance KW - mispronunciation detection KW - eye-tracking KW - pupillometry Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000918000259 SN - 0305-0009 SN - 1469-7602 VL - 46 IS - 1 SP - 1 EP - 23 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Szendrői, Kriszta A1 - Schumacher, Rebecca A1 - Fritzsche, Tom A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - Acquisition of quantifier raising of a universal across an existential BT - Evidence from German JF - Glossa : a journal of general linguistics N2 - Our paper reports an act out task with German 5- and 6-year olds and adults involving doubly-quantified sentences with a universal object and an existential subject. We found that 5- and 6-year olds allow inverse scope in such sentences, while adults do not. Our findings contribute to a growing body of research (e.g. Gualmini et al. 2008; Musolino 2009, etc.) showing that children are more flexible in their scopal considerations than initially proposed by the Isomorphism proposal (Lidz & Musolino 2002; Musolino & Lidz 2006). This result provides support for a theory of German, a “no quantifier raising”-language, in terms of soft violable constraints, or global economy terms (Bobaljik & Wurmbrand 2012), rather than in terms of hard inviolable constraints or rules (Frey 1993). Finally, the results are compatible with Reinhart’s (2004) hypothesis that children do not perform global interface economy considerations due to the increased processing associated with it. KW - quantifier raising KW - language development KW - inverse scope reading KW - German language KW - interface economy Y1 - 2017 SN - 2397-1835 VL - 2 PB - Open Library of Humanities CY - London ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Szendroi, Kriszta A1 - Bernard, Carline A1 - Berger, Frauke A1 - Gervain, Judit A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - Acquisition of prosodic focus marking by English, French, and German three-, four-, five- and six-year-olds JF - Journal of child language N2 - Previous research on young children's knowledge of prosodic focus marking has revealed an apparent paradox, with comprehension appearing to lag behind production. Comprehension of prosodic focus is difficult to study experimentally due to its subtle and ambiguous contribution to pragmatic meaning. We designed a novel comprehension task, which revealed that three- to six-year-old children show adult-like comprehension of the prosodic marking of subject and object focus. Our findings thus support the view that production does not precede comprehension in the acquisition of focus. We tested participants speaking English, German, and French. All three languages allow prosodic subject and object focus marking, but use additional syntactic marking to varying degrees (English: dispreferred; German: possible; French preferred). French participants produced fewer subject marked responses than English participants. We found no other cross-linguistic differences. Participants interpreted prosodic focus marking similarly and in an adult-like fashion in all three languages. Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000917000071 SN - 0305-0009 SN - 1469-7602 VL - 45 IS - 1 SP - 219 EP - 241 PB - Cambridge Univ. Press CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Schröder, C. A1 - Höhle, Barbara T1 - Prosodic perception during early language acquisition JF - Sprache, Stimme, Gehör : Zeitschrift für Kommunikationsstörungen N2 - Prosody plays an important role in early language acquisition that in most children proceeds rapidly and easily. From birth on infants are able to perceive prosodic information in the speech signal. During the course of the first year of life prosodic perception abilities continue to develop. Cross-linguistic studies have shown that this development is already influenced by the native language. As prosodic and syntactic units occur often in correlation, prosodic cues in the continuous speech signal might help infants to derive information on how to segment their native language into syntactically relevant units. Indeed, infants use their prosodic perception and are able to detect word, phrase and clause boundaries using prosodic cues from the speech signal. Thus, during the first year of life when perceiving speech the processing of prosodic cues is focussed and allows for an efficient access to language acquisition. Future studies need to determine whether early prosodic perception abilities can provide markers for later language development and predict language impairment. KW - prosodic processing KW - early speech perception KW - segmentation KW - prosodic cues KW - prosody-syntax interface Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1055/s-0031-1284404 SN - 0342-0477 VL - 35 IS - 3 SP - E91 EP - E98 PB - Thieme CY - Stuttgart ER -