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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.
Das 12. Herbsttreffen Patholinguistik mit dem Schwerpunktthema »Weg(e) mit dem Stottern: Therapie und Selbsthilfe für Kinder und Erwachsene« fand am 24.11.2018 in Potsdam statt. Das Herbsttreffen wird seit 2007 jährlich vom Verband für Patholinguistik e.V. (vpl) durchgeführt. Der vorliegende Tagungsband beinhaltet die Vorträge zum Schwerpunktthema sowie Beiträge der Posterpräsentationen zu weiteren Themen aus der sprachtherapeutischen Forschung und Praxis.
This study investigates prosodic phrasing of bracketed lists in German. We analyze variation in pauses, phrase-final lengthening and f0 in speech production and how these cues affect boundary perception. In line with the literature, it was found that pauses are often used to signal intonation phrase boundaries, while final lengthening and f0 are employed across different levels of the prosodic hierarchy. Deviations from expectations based on the standard syntax-prosody mapping are interpreted in terms of task-specific effects. That is, we argue that speakers add/delete prosodic boundaries to enhance the phonological contrast between different bracketings in the experimental task. In perception, three experiments were run, in which we tested only single cues (but temporally distributed at different locations of the sentences). Results from identification tasks and reaction time measurements indicate that pauses lead to a more abrupt shift in listeners׳ prosodic judgments, while f0 and final lengthening are exploited in a more gradient manner. Hence, pauses, final lengthening and f0 have an impact on boundary perception, though listeners show different sensitivity to the three acoustic cues.
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.