Children’s use of prosody to identify ambiguous sets of compound nouns

Abstract

Research has shown that young children can process word duration and fundamental frequency (F0) information in an adultlike manner to disambiguate simple conjoined English phrases [Beach et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 99, 1148–1160 (1996)]. However, the processing of pause duration has not been investigated in this manner. The present study investigates how children use pause duration and F0 to perceive word boundaries, and whether the manner of information processing differs between children and adults. Adults and children (5 and 7 years old) completed a picture-pointing task based on auditory stimuli. Stimuli were computed-edited tokens of the words ‘‘sun,’’ ‘‘flower,’’ and ‘‘pot.’’ From a recording by a male talker, vocoded tokens were created with five steps of pause duration and three steps of fundamental frequency. Both continua ranged between patterns suggesting the interpretations ‘‘sun, flowerpot’’ and ‘‘sunflower, pot.’’ Preliminary results indicate a cue-trading relation between duration and F0 for all listeners, with pause duration playing the dominant role. These data suggest adultlike processing in children as young as 5 years old. Experiments with younger children and a formal evaluation of the pattern recognition processes used by listeners are currently underway in our laboratory.