Prosodic Development Research Articles

Cross‐language study of children's prosodic development—I: Description of the data set

A study has been initiated comparing the prosodic development of 2‐ through 5‐year‐old Austrian, French, and Swedish children. Three girls and three boys at each of four age levels (2, 3, 4, and 5 years) were tape recorded in Salzburg, Aix‐en‐Provence, and Stockholm, once in autumn, 1979, and then again six months later. The 2 year olds named pictures chosen for their polysyllabic structure and comparable segmental composition between languages (e.g., elephant). The 3 year olds conversed with an assistant in a slightly constrained situation until an adequate speech sample had been obtained. The 4 and 5 year olds, in addition to conversing with the assistant, played a rhythmic naming game (the TAKI task). All recordings were stereo, to aid subsequent perceptual analysis, and great attention was paid to the resulting acoustic quality. Analyses are presently under way, and findings of interest will be reported. [Supported by NSF and The University of North Carolina.]