Chapter published in:
The Development of Prosody in First Language Acquisition
Edited by Pilar Prieto and Núria Esteve-Gibert
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 23] 2018
► pp. 37–57

Chapter 3
Early sensitivity and acquisition of prosodic patterns at the lexical level

| Université Paris Descartes, Sorbonne Paris Cité & CNRS (Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, UMR 8158)
| University of Potsdam
| University of Potsdam
| 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
    • Lexical pitch accents
    • Lexical tones
  • Lexical stress and word form segmentation
  • Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 24 May 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.23.03bha
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