Knowledge Bank

Previous work has indicated that although children can often produce appropriate prosody at an early age, their comprehension of its use for some functions does not become adultlike un- til middle to late childhood (Wells et al., 2004; Cruttenden, 1985; Cutler & Swinney, 1987; Vogel & Raimy, 2002; Atkinson-King, 1973). This study asks whether 7-12 year old children show age- related developments in their ability to use prosody to 1) distinguish compound nouns from adjective-noun phrases and 2) identify contrastive focus. Study participants (n=61) performed two forced-choice picture selection tasks to test their comprehension. For the compound-phrase disambiguation task, the Old (11-12) age group was found to differ significantly from the Young (7-8) age group, supporting the claim of Vogel and Raimy (2002) and Atkinson-King (1973) that this ability in children does not become adultlike until age 11. Subjects exhibited a bias toward selecting the compound interpretation in both stress conditions, though the stress pattern heard did influence their selections, and this bias increased between the youngest and oldest subjects. For the focus task, no age-related effects were found. Subjects were significantly more accurate when focus was on an adjective than on a noun.