Children’s use of prosody to identify phrasal units.

Abstract

This study investigates how children use syllable duration and fundamental frequency cues to identify phrasal units, and whether children’s cue trading relationships resemble those of adults. Adults and 7-year-old children were asked to complete a picture-pointing, discrimination task based upon auditorally presented stimuli. Auditory stimuli were computer-edited tokens of the ambiguous phrase ‘‘pink and green and white.’’ From a recording by a male speaker, vocoded stimuli were created with five steps of syllable duration and three steps of fundamental frequency. Both continua ranged between patterns suggesting the interpretation [(pink and green) and white] and [(pink) and green and white]. Results indicate that, for adults, both intonation and duration influenced identification of phrasal units, and cue trading was evident. The children were also sensitive to the prosodic manipulations. However, duration had a strong influence on interpretation, pitch had only a slight influence, and there was little evidence of cue trading. These data suggest that children can use prosody to identify phrasal units, but do so differently than adults.