Abstract
Previous research established that young children are sensitive to prosodic cues discriminating between syntactic structures of otherwise similarly sounding sentences in a language unknown to them. In this study, we explore the role of working memory that children might deploy for the purpose of the sentence-level prosodic discrimination. Nine-year old Slovenian monolingual and bilingual children (N = 70) were tested on a same-different prosodic discrimination task in a language unknown to them (French) and on the working memory measures in the form of forward and backward digit span and non-word repetition tasks. The results suggest that both the storage and processing components of the working memory are involved in the prosodic discrimination task.
Highlights
Prosody or sentence-level intonational contour plays a major role in people’s language comprehension ability providing acoustic cues for identifying syntactic phrases or constituents
The present study explores the role of both phonological storage and processing components of the working memory for the purpose of prosodic discrimination of natural language sentences in nine-year old children
The latter finding corroborates the results reported in previous studies of non-word repetition in various types of populations and is consistent with the models of working memory that involve a phonological short-term memory (p-STM) component with a rehearsal procedure
Summary
Prosody or sentence-level intonational contour plays a major role in people’s language comprehension ability providing acoustic cues for identifying syntactic phrases or constituents. Bilingualism and music training are known to sharpen perceptual ability to sounds [11,12,13] This includes better success in the prosodic domain, such as easier recognition and discrimination of prosodic patterns as well as rhythm in language or music [14,15,16,17,18,19]. 18-month old children were shown to use sentential prosody to facilitate word learning [21]. [22] found that Slovenian-speaking elementary school children make use of a number of prosodic cues to successfully differentiate pairs of short syntactically well-formed sentences in a language unknown to them.
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