Many approaches to early word learning posit that children assume a one-to-one mapping of form and meaning. However, children's early vocabularies contain homophones, words that violate that assumption. Children might learn such words by exploiting prosodic differences between homophone meanings that are associated with lemma frequency (Gahl,…

Infants perceive intonation contrasts early in development in contrast to lexical stress but similarly to lexical pitch accent. Previous studies have mostly focused on pitch height/direction contrasts; however, languages use a variety of pitch features to signal meaning, including differences in pitch timing. In this study, we investigate infants'…

Terminal changes in fundamental frequency provide the most salient acoustic cues to declarative questions, but adults sometimes identify such questions from pre-terminal cues. In the present study, adults and 7- to 10-year-old children judged a single speaker's adult- and child-directed utterances as questions or statements in a gating task with…

A noun can be potentially ambiguous as to whether it is a head on its own, or is a modifier of a Noun + Noun compound waiting for its head. This study investigates whether young children can exploit the prosodic information on a modifier constituent preceding the head to facilitate resolution of such ambiguity in Japanese. Evidence from English…

The goal of this study was to investigate the effects of prosodic stress patterns and semantic depth on word learning. Twelve preschool-aged children with typically developing speech and language skills participated in a word learning task. Novel words with either a trochaic or iambic prosodic pattern were embedded in one of two learning…

In the current study we investigate whether 2- and 3-year-old German children use intonation productively to mark the informational status of referents. Using a story-telling task, we compared children's and adults' intonational realization via pitch accent (H*, L* and de-accentuation) of New, Given, and Contrastive referents. Both children and…