It is well known that mental state verbs are difficult to acquire, but little is known about the acquisition of mental state language encoded through intonation. Puerto Rican Spanish (PRS) has at least three intonation contours available for marking polar questions (PQs): ¡H*L% marks an utterance as a PQ; H+L*L%, in addition to doing the former,…

This study investigates 3- to 5-year-old children's sensitivity to lexical, intonational and gestural information in the comprehension of speaker uncertainty. Most previous studies on children's understanding of speaker certainty and uncertainty across languages have focused on the comprehension of lexical markers, and little is known about the…

It is the contention here that the "prelinguistic" period is an important phase of the language acquisition process. Accordingly the research reported represents an attempt to begin mapping out the types of linguistically relevant information to which a young child attends. Specifically it is hypothesized that young children are…

Research undertaken to date suggests that important developments in the understanding and use of intonation may take place after the age of 5;0. The present study aims to provide a more comprehensive account of these developments. A specially designed battery of prosodic tasks was administered to four groups of thirty children, from London (U.K.),…

Most studies of language acquisition overlook the fact that a child learns language in the context of acquiring the social skill of conversing known as "turn-taking." The few studies of verbal turn-taking in children suggest that prosodic features (suprasegmentals) and turn-taking skills are integrated by the age of two years, nine months, and…

The influence of visual and auditory factors and intonational emphasis on sentence comprehension skills of young normal and mentally handicapped children was studied, using the Sentence Comprehension Test. (Sample items are appended). (Author/MH)