Infants' Perception of Intonation: Is It a Statement or a Question?

• Autor(a) principal: Frota, Sónia
• Data de Publicação: 2014
• Outros Autores: Butler, Joseph, Vigário, Marina
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/25158

The ability to distinguish phonetic variations in speech that are relevant tomeaning is essential for infants’ language development. Previous studies intothe acquisition of prosodic categories have focused on lexical stress, lexicalpitch accent, or lexical tone. However, very little is known about the develop-mental course of infants’ perception of linguistic intonation. In this study, weinvestigate infants’ perception of the correlates of the statement/yes–no ques-tion contrast in a language that marks this sentence type distinction only byprosodic means, European Portuguese (EP). Using a modified version of thevisual habituation paradigm, EP-learning infants at 5–6 and 8–9 months wereable to successfully discriminate segmentally varied, single-prosodic wordintonational phrases presented with statement or yes–no question intonation,demonstrating that they are sensitive to the prosodic cues marking this distinc-tion as early as 5 months and maintain this sensitivity throughout the firstyear. These results suggest the presence of precocious discrimination abilitiesfor intonation across segmental variation, similarly to previous reports for lex-ical pitch accent, but unlike previous findings for word stress.