Thierry Nazzi | Université Paris Descartes, Sorbonne Paris Cité
CNRS (Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, UMR
8158)
This chapter reviews sensitivity to prosodic information at the
lexical level during the first year of life, considering
crosslinguistic data that bear on both monolingual and bilingual
acquisition. First, we discuss infants’ early ability to
discriminate lexical stress, and how this sensitivity changes across
development depending on the native language, reflecting the
acquisition of native prosodic properties. Second, we present data
establishing the emergence of language-specific lexical stress
preferences during that same period, also attesting
language-specific acquisition. We then discuss data on the less well
studied perception of lexical pitch accent and tone. Finally, we
consider the role of lexical stress in early word segmentation
abilities, and discuss the representations and processes underlying
early prosodic perception at the lexical level.
Article outline
Introduction
From language-general to language-specific processing of lexical
stress
Discrimination of word-level stress patterns
Acquisition of lexical stress patterns
An attempt at dissociating the acoustic correlates of
stress
Bilingualism and lexical stress
Bilingual infants’ discrimination of lexical stress
patterns
Bilingual infants’ preference for native prosodic
patterns
Beyond lexical stress: Lexical pitch accents and lexical
tones
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