Children’s production of prosody: Disambiguating sets of compound nouns

Abstract

Studies have suggested that although young children may perceive prosodic patterns marking structural boundaries in ambiguous sentences (e.g., distinguishing ‘‘pink and green, and white’’ from ‘‘pink, and green and white’’), children do not necessarily produce these prosodic patterns. However, most of these studies did not test perception and production in the same group of subjects. Therefore, the relation between perception and production for a given linguistic structure could not be clearly established. Yoshida and Katz [‘‘Children’s use of prosody to identify ambiguous sets of compound nouns,’’ J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 116, 2645 (2004)] had young children and adults listen to resynthesized speech versions of ‘‘sun/flower/pot.’’ F0 and duration patterns were parametrically manipulated to provide a continuum of interpretations between ‘‘sun, flowerpot’’ and ‘‘sunflower, pot.’’ Results indicated that children showed adultlike processing of duration and F0 cues. The current study reports acoustic data for productions made by these same subjects (elicited prior to the perceptual experiment). Subjects played a naming game with pictures that depicted either (a) a sunflower and a pot or (b) a sun and a flowerpot. Acoustic analyses support the idea that children and adults control both duration and F0 to disambiguate their utterances. Results suggest that previous studies may have underestimated young children’s capacity for producing prosodic structures.