Cup! Cup? Cup: Comprehension of intentional prosody in adults and children

Abstract

Prosody is the way something is spoken. Adults and children regularly use prosody in language comprehension and production, and much of this research focuses solely on emotion or on syntactic interpretation. The current study focuses on comprehension of intentional prosody devoid of semantic information as indicators of different types of speech acts. Adults (n = 72) and preschool children (n = 72) were asked to identify the referent of an isolated label (familiar or nonsense words) based solely on the varying prosodic information. Labels were spoken with intentional prosody (warning, doubting, naming) such that their prosody implied a particular intended referent. Adults and preschoolers selected the intended referent at above chance levels of performance for both familiar and nonsense words and for all three intentions, with adults performing faster and more accurately than children. Overall, this research demonstrates that preschool children and adults can use prosody to successfully determine the intended referent behind words and nonsense words, even if they are in isolation. This finding suggests that prosody alone conveys certain aspects of meaning during the preschool years.