Language‐universal aspects of intonation in children's first sentences

Abstract

Intonation usually segments speech into sentences. The “breath‐group” theory [P. Lieberman, Intonation, Perception and Language (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1967)] claims that a significant acoustic cue for delimiting sentences is the fall in fundamental frequency and amplitude at the breath‐group's end. The “declination” theory [S. Maeda, “A characterization of American English Intonation,” MIT dissertation (1976)], in contrast, claims that the significant cue is a gradual, linear, fall in fundamental frequency. Both theories claim that the sentence delimiting function of intonation is language universal and probably innate. However, whereas the breath‐group theory allows variation in the nonterminal fundamental frequency contour, the declination theory claims that a linear fall through the entire intonation contour is language universal. if the language‐universal aspect of intonation has an innate basis we should expect it to be manifested in the initial sentences of young children. We therefore derived fundamental frequency contours using computer‐implemented techniques from a corpus of one, two, and three word utterances produced by three children between 52 and 104 weeks of life. The data refute the claims of the declination theory; fundamental frequency does not fall in a gradual, linear manner through the utterance.