The effect of intonation on children's perception of contrast in visual search
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Date
2010-06
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
The acquisition of prosody is an area that has been the subject of much debate, particularly with regard to the acquisition of pitch accents. In English a pitch accent is a prominent local excursion in the tune of an utterance described as being low, high, or some combination of the two and which is used to convey pragmatic information about the utterance. Much of previous research investigating children's understanding of specific pitch accents has concluded that children have a poor grasp of them—even well into grade-school ages (Cruttenden, 1985; Cutler & Swinney, 1987; Gualmini, Maciukaite, & Crain, 2002; Hornby, 1971; Wells, Peppé, & Goulandris, 2004). However, more recent research with Japanese-speaking 6-year-olds has shown that children are able to comprehend contrastive focus and even use it to make predictions about upcoming speech (Ito, Jincho, Minai, Yamane, & Mazuka, ms; Ito, Jincho, Yamane, Minai, & Mazuka, 2009a & 2009b). This research was adapted in order to measure English-speaking 6- to 7-year-old children’s responses to the L+H* pitch accent while the children were engaged in a visual search task. This research found that children between the ages of 6 and 7 do comprehend the implications of L+H* and in fact show facilitated fixations to a target when L+H* is used felicitously and erroneous fixations when L+H* is used infelicitously. The timing of the children’s fixations however were delayed as compared to the adult control group, which suggests that children’s processing of these pitch accents is still under development between the ages of 6 and 7.
Advisor: Shari R. Speer
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Keywords
pitch accent, development, L+H*, eyetracking