Cultural experiences can influence how people attend to different emotional cues. Whereas semantic content explicitly describes feelings, vocal tone conveys implicit information regarding emotions. This cross-cultural study examined children's attention to emotional cues in spoken words. The sample consisted of 121 European American (EA) and 120…

Why are spatial metaphors, like the use of "high" to describe a musical pitch, so common? This study tested one hundred and fifty-four 3- to 5-year-old English-learning children on their ability to learn a novel adjective in the domain of space or pitch and to extend this adjective to the untrained dimension. Children were more…

The present experiments tested bilingual infants' developmental narrowing for the interpretation of sounds that form words. These studies addressed how language specialization proceeds when the environment provides varied and divergent input. Experiment 1 (N = 32) demonstrated that bilingual 14- and 19-month-olds learned a pair of object labels…

Using a novel emotional perspective-taking task, this study investigated 4-year-olds' (n = 97) use of a speaker's emotional prosody to make inferences about the speaker's emotional state and, correspondingly, their communicative intent. Eye gaze measures indicated preschoolers used emotional perspective inferences to guide their real-time…

Infants must develop both flexibility and constraint in their interpretation of acceptable word forms. The current experiments examined the development of infants' lexical interpretation of non-native variations in pitch contour. Fourteen-, 17-, and 19-month-olds (Experiments 1 and 2, N = 72) heard labels for two novel objects; labels…

The propensity to raise and vary the pitch of one's voice when addressing an infant or small child was investigated in a sample of 16 male and 16 female adults, half of whom were married with children and half of whom had never married and never had children. (Author/RH)

The purpose of this study was to describe the pattern in which English-speaking children acquire intonation. A second goal was to account for emerging intonation from a theoretical perspective. Six groups of 10 children each between the ages of 6 and 23 months participated in individual play sessions with their mothers and an experimenter. Pitch…

A total of 16 mothers and 16 fathers were recorded in dyadic sessions with their children (eight five year olds, eight two year olds; half boys, half girls) and with an adult. Noise-free questions and declaratives were analyzed for pitch and frequency range. Results suggest that both fundamental frequency and range are significantly influenced by…

Reports on three experiments that assessed the attentional responses of 4-month-old infants to frequency-modulated sweeps corresponding to the frequency range of adult-to-infant and adult-to-adult intonational patterns. (HOD)

Results suggest that children acquire speech registers concurrently with language and that the progression of acquisition varies more for registers than for grammatical forms. (Author)

Explored the power of intonation of speech addressed to adults and preverbal infants to convey meaningful information to 80 adult listeners. Listeners used intonation to identify speaker's intent with greater accuracy in infant-directed speech than adult-directed speech. (RJC)

Explored in three experiments children's understanding of emotion in speech. Found gradual developmental change from 4-year-olds' focus on content to adult's focus on paralanguage. Children exhibited greater response latencies to utterances with conflicting cues than to those with nonconflicting cues. They accurately labeled affective paralanguage…

Asks adults and 6-, 9- and, 13 year olds' questions about tape-recorded stories in order to investigate their ability to recognize sincere, deceptive, and sarcastic remarks. Results indicate that the youngest children interpret all remarks as sincere; 9 and 13 year olds can appreciate deliberate falsehood, but only adults identify sarcasm.…

Two experiments compared the abilities of third and sixth graders and adults to recognize sarcasm given context and intonation cues. Children recognized sarcasm only when given a speaker's sarcastic intonation cue, even when context strongly indicated a nonliteral interpretation. (BC)