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ERIC Number: EJ1485720
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2024-Jan
Pages: 31
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0305-0009
EISSN: EISSN-1469-7602
Available Date: 0000-00-00
Utterance-Initial Prosodic Differences between Statements and Questions in Infant-Directed Speech
Susan Geffen1,2; Kelly Burkinshaw2,3; Angeliki Athanasopoulou3; Suzanne Curtin4
Journal of Child Language, v51 n1 p137-167 2024
Cross-linguistically, statements and questions broadly differ in syntactic organization. To learn the syntactic properties of each sentence type, learners might first rely on non-syntactic information. This paper analyzed prosodic differences between infant-directed "wh"-questions and statements to determine what kinds of cues might be available. We predicted there would be a significant difference depending on the first words that appear in "wh"-questions (e.g., two closed-class words; meaning words from a category that rarely changes) compared to the variety of first words found in statements. We measured F0, duration, and intensity of the first two words in statements and "wh"-questions in naturalistic speech from 13 mother-child dyads in the Brent corpus of the CHILDES database. Results found larger differences between sentence-types when the second word was an open-class not a closed-class word, suggesting a relationship between prosodic and syntactic information in an utterance-initial position that infants may use to make sentence-type distinctions.
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: 1Department of Psychology, Occidental College; 2Department of Psychology, University of Calgary, Canada; 3School of Languages, Linguistics, Literatures and Cultures, University of Calgary, Canada; 4Department of Child and Youth Studies, Brock University, Canada