Hostname: page-component-6bf8c574d5-mggfc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-02-18T21:16:38.813Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Children's identification of questions from rising terminal pitch

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2015

MATHIEU R. SAINDON ,
SANDRA E. TREHUB ,
E. GLENN SCHELLENBERG  and
PASCAL VAN LIESHOUT
MATHIEU R. SAINDON
Affiliation:
University of Toronto, Canada
SANDRA E. TREHUB*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto, Canada
E. GLENN SCHELLENBERG
Affiliation:
University of Toronto, Canada
PASCAL VAN LIESHOUT
Affiliation:
University of Toronto, Canada
*
[*]Address for correspondence:University of Toronto – Psychology, 3359 Mississauga Rd, N Mississauga, Ontario L5L 1C6, Canada. e-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Young children are slow to master conventional intonation patterns in their yes/no questions, which may stem from imperfect understanding of the links between terminal pitch contours and pragmatic intentions. In Experiment 1, five- to ten-year-old children and adults were required to judge utterances as questions or statements on the basis of intonation alone. Children eight years of age or younger performed above chance levels but less accurately than adult listeners. To ascertain whether the verbal content of utterances interfered with young children's attention to the relevant acoustic cues, low-pass filtered versions of the same utterances were presented to children and adults in Experiment 2. Low-pass filtering reduced performance comparably for all age groups, perhaps because such filtering reduced the salience of critical pitch cues. Young children's difficulty in differentiating declarative questions from statements is not attributable to basic perceptual difficulties but rather to absent or unstable intonation categories.

Type
Brief Research Report
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 43 , Issue 5 , September 2016 , pp. 1174 - 1191
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Aguert, M., Laval, V., Bigot, L. & Bernicot, J. (2010). The role of prosody and situational context in French-speaking 5- to 9-year-olds. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 53, 1629–41.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Andrews, M. L. & Madeira, S. S. (1977). The assessment of pitch discrimination ability in young children. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders 42, 279–86.Google Scholar
Boersma, P. & van Heuven, V. (2001). Speak and unSpeak with PRAAT. Glot International 5, 9–10.Google Scholar
Costa-Giomi, E. & Descombes, V. (1996). Pitch labels with single and multiple meanings: a study with French-speaking children. Journal of Research in Music Education 44, 204–14.Google Scholar
Cowan, N., Morey, C. C., AuBuchon, A. M., Zwilling, C. E. & Gilchrist, A. L. (2010). Seven-year-olds allocate attention like adults unless working memory is overloaded. Developmental Science 13, 120–33.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Creel, S. C. (2014). Tipping the scales: auditory cue weighing changes over development. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 40, 1146–60.Google Scholar
Cruttenden, A. (1981). Falls and rises: meanings and universals. Journal of Linguistics 17, 77–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Doherty, C. P., Fitzsimons, M., Asenbauer, B. & Staunton, H. (1999). Discrimination of prosody and music by normal children. European Journal of Neurology 6, 221–6.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Eady, S. J. & Cooper, W. E. (1986). Speech intonation and focus location in matched statements and questions. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 80, 402–15.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ekman, P. (1976). Movements with precise meanings. Journal of Communication 26, 14–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ekman, P. (1979). About brows: emotional and conversational signals. In von Cranach, M., Foppa, K., Lepenies, W. & Ploog, D. (eds), Human ethology: claims and limits of a new discipline, 169–249. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Estigarribia, B. (2010). Facilitation by variation: right-to-left learning of English yes/no questions. Cognitive Science 34, 68–93.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Foulkes, P., Docherty, G. & Watt, D. (2005). Phonological variation in child-directed speech. Language 81, 177–206.Google Scholar
Froda, S., Butler, J. & Vigario, M. (2014). Infants’ perception of intonation: Is it a statement or a question? Infancy 19, 194–213.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Friend, M. (2000). Developmental changes in sensitivity to vocal paralanguage. Developmental Science 3, 148–62.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gårding, E. & Abramson, A. S. (1965). A study of the perception of some American English intonation contours. Studia Linguistica 19, 61–79.Google Scholar
Gunlogson, C. (2003). True to form: rising and falling declaratives as questions in English. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hervais-Adelman, A., Davis, M. H., Johnsrude, I. S. & Carlyon, R. P. (2008). Perceptual learning of noise vocoded words: effects of feedback and lexicality. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 34, 460–74.Google Scholar
Hervais-Adelman, A. G., Davis, M. H., Johnsrude, I. S., Taylor, K. J. & Carlyon, R. P. (2011). Generalization of perceptual learning of vocoded speech. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 37, 283–95.Google ScholarPubMed
Jacobson, J. L., Boersma, D. C., Fields, R. B. & Olson, K. L. (1983). Paralinguistic features of adult speech to infants and small children. Child Development 54, 436–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Knoll, M. A., Uther, M. & Costall, A. (2009). Effects of low-pass filtering on the judgment of vocal affect in speech directed to infants, adults and foreigners. Speech Communication 51, 210–16.Google Scholar
Loeb, D. F. & Allen, G. D. (1993). Children's imitation of intonation contours. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 36, 4–13.Google Scholar
Morton, J. B. & Munakata, Y. (2002). Are you listening? Exploring a developmental knowledge–action dissociation in a speech interpretation task. Developmental Science 5, 435–40.Google Scholar
Morton, J. B. & Trehub, S. E. (2001). Children's understanding of emotion in speech. Child Development 72, 834–43.Google Scholar
Munakata, Y., Snyder, H. R. & Chatham, C. H. (2012). Developing cognitive control: three key transitions. Current Directions in Psychological Science 21, 71–7.Google Scholar
Papoušek, M., Bornstein, M. H., Nuzzo, C., Papoušek, H. & Symmes, D. (1990). Infant responses to prototypical melodic contours in parental speech. Infant Behavior and Development 13, 539–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Patel, R. & Brayton, J. T. (2009). Identifying prosodic contrasts in utterances produced by 4-, 7-, and 11-year-old children. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 52, 790–801.Google Scholar
Patel, R. & Grigos, M. I. (2006). Acoustic characterization of the question–statement contrast in 4-, 7- and 11-year-old children. Speech Communication 48, 1308–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peng, S. C., Lu, N. & Chatterjee, M. (2009). Effects of cooperating and conflicting cues on speech intonation recognition by cochlear implant users and normal hearing listeners. Audiology and Neurotology 14, 327–37.Google Scholar
Scherer, K. R., Koivumaki, J. & Rosenthal, R. (1972). Minimal cues in the vocal communication of affect: judging emotions from content-masked speech. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 1, 269–85.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Snedeker, J. & Trueswell, J. C. (2004). The developing constraints on parsing decisions: the role of lexical biases and referential scenes in child and adult sentence processing. Cognitive Psychology 49, 238–99.Google Scholar
Snow, C. E. (1977). Mothers’ speech research: from input to interaction. In Snow, C. E. & Ferguson, C. A. (eds), Talking to children (pp. 31–49). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Snow, D. (1994). Phrase-final syllable lengthening and intonation in early child speech. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 37, 831–40.Google Scholar
Snow, D. (1998). Children's imitations of intonation contours: Are rising tones more difficult than falling tones? Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 41, 576–87.Google Scholar
Soderstrom, M., Ko, E.-S. & Nevzorova, U. (2011). It's a question? Infants attend differently to yes/no questions and declaratives. Infant Behavior and Development 34, 107–10.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Spruyt, A., Clarysse, J., Vansteenwegen, D., Baeyens, F. & Hermans, D. (2010). Affect 4·0: a free software package for implementing psychological and psychophysiological experiments. Experimental Psychology 57, 36–45.Google Scholar
Srinivasan, R. J. & Massaro, D. W. (2003). Perceiving prosody from the face and voice: distinguishing statements from echoic questions in English. Language and Speech 46, 1–22.Google Scholar
Stalinski, S. M., Schellenberg, E. G. & Trehub, S. E. (2008). Developmental changes in the perception of pitch contour: distinguishing up from down. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 124, 1759–63.Google Scholar
Studdert-Kennedy, M. & Hadding, K. (1973). Auditory and linguistic processes in the perception of intonation contours. Language and Speech 16, 293–313.Google Scholar
Thorpe, L. A., Trehub, S. E., Morrongiello, B. A. & Bull, D. (1988). Perceptual grouping by infants and preschool children. Developmental Psychology 24, 484–91.Google Scholar
van Bezooijen, R. & Boves, L. (1986). The effects of low-pass filtering and random splicing on the perception of speech. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 15, 403–17.Google Scholar
Warden, D. (1981). Children's understanding of ask and tell . Journal of Child Language 8, 139–49.Google Scholar
Waxer, M. & Morton, J. B. (2011). Children's judgments of emotion from conflicting cues in speech: why 6-year-olds are so inflexible. Child Development 82, 1648–60.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Whalen, D., Levitt, A. G. & Wang, Q. (1991). Intonational differences between the reduplicative babbling of French- and English-learning infants. Journal of Child Language 18, 501–16.Google Scholar

Saindon supplementary material

Saindon supplementary material 1

Download Saindon supplementary material(Audio)
Audio 360.1 KB

Saindon supplementary material

Saindon supplementary material 2

Download Saindon supplementary material(Audio)
Audio 360.1 KB

Saindon supplementary material

Saindon supplementary material 3

Download Saindon supplementary material(Audio)
Audio 359.9 KB

Saindon supplementary material

Saindon supplementary material 4

Download Saindon supplementary material(Audio)
Audio 359.9 KB