Previous evidence suggests that children's mastery of prosodic modulations to signal the informational status of discourse referents emerges quite late in development. In the present study, we investigate the children's use of head gestures as it compares to prosodic cues to signal a referent as being contrastive relative to a set of possible…

This study explores the use of F0, intensity and duration in the production of two types of prominences in French: primary accent with duration as the main acoustic cue, and secondary accent with F0 and intensity as acoustic cues. These parameters were studied in 13 children using a cochlear implant (CI) and 17 children with a normal hearing (NH),…

The "syntactic bootstrapping" hypothesis proposes that syntactic structure provides children with cues for learning the meaning of novel words. In this article, we address the question of how children might start acquiring some aspects of syntax before they possess a sizeable lexicon. The study presents two models of early syntax…

This study investigates prosodic (noun length) and lexical-semantic (animacy) influences on determiner use in the spontaneous speech of three children acquiring French, Austrian German and Dutch. In support of typological and language-specific hypotheses from the Germanic-Romance contrast, an advantage of monosyllabic nouns and of inanimate nouns…

Two experiments tested whether phonological phrase boundaries constrain online syntactic analysis in French. Pairs of homophones belonging to different syntactic categories (verb and adjective) were used to create sentences with a local syntactic ambiguity (e.g., [le petit chien "mort"], in English, the "dead" little dog, vs.…

This article reports on a study to determine the role of intonation in language acquisition. Related studies are mentioned. Research methods for the study are outlined and two case studies are reviewed. Conclusions show that adult-child interaction influences not only the child's use of intonation but also his acquisition of syntax. (Text is in…

This study of 10 intonation curves, representative of speech patterns in French, entails spectrographic analysis of the variations of fundamental frequency, intensity, and duration. Discriminatory auditory tests are based on semantic oppositions caused by single intonation contrasts. The seven distinctive classes called "intonemes" are: (1) minor…

A collection of 21 papers, most presented at the Fifth International Conference on Contrastive Projects in June 1982 in Finland, includes: "Searching for Linguistic Universals through Contrastive Analysis,""Oral Discourse and Contrastive Analysis: Towards a French vs. Finno-Scandinavian Model,""Cultural Effect on the Comprehensibility of Reading…