Cover not available
Part of
The Development of Prosody in First Language Acquisition
Edited by Pilar Prieto and Núria Esteve-Gibert
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 23] 2018
► pp. 59–77

Chapter 4
The role of prosody in early word learning

Behavioral evidence

Successful word learning in first language acquisition requires three components: segmentation of words from a continuous speech stream, identification of real-word referents or concepts, and mapping of linguistic label to meaning. This review presents behavioral evidence for how prosody is integral to each of these processes, with particular prosodic structures creating optimal word learning environments. Different prosodic strategies aid the three facets of word learning, with rhythm, stress, intonation, and phrasing interacting to facilitate learning. For example, recent behavioral work shows that word learning is enhanced when words appear at prosodic phrase boundaries and when new words carry a more prominent pitch accent. Finally, an integrative account of word learning is discussed in light of these findings.

Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Word learning components and the role of prosody
    • Segmentation
    • Referent/object identification
    • Mapping linguistic form to meaning
  • Integrative approaches to word learning
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 24 May 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.23.04tho
References
Akhtar, N., Carpenter, M., & Tomasello, M.
(1996) The role of discourse novelty in early word learning. Child Development, 67, 635–645. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Arnold, J
(2008) THE BACON not the bacon: How children and adults understand accented and unaccented noun phrases. Cognition, 108, 69–99. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Aslin, R. N., Saffran, J., & Newport, E.
(1998) Computation of conditional probability statistics by 8-month-old infants. Psychological Science, 9(4), 321–324. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baumann, S., & Roth, A.
(2014) Prominence and coreference: On the perceptual relevance of F0 movement, duration and intensity. Proceedings of Speech Prosody 7 – Dublin, 227–231.
Beckman, M., & Pierrehumbert, J. B.
(1986) Intonational structure in English and Japanese. Phonology Yearbook, 3, 255–310. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bloom, P.
(2000) How children learn the meanings of words. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Bolinger, D. L.
(1989) Intonation and its uses: Melody in grammar and discourse. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Bortfeld, H., Morgan, J., Golinkoff, R. M., & Rathbun, K.
(2005) Mommy and me: Familiar names help launch babies into speech-stream segmentation. Psychological Science, 16(4), 298–304. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brent, M. R., & Siskind, J. M.
(2001) The role of exposure to isolated words in early vocabulary development. Cognition, 81, B33–B44. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brentari, D., Falk, J., & Wolford, G.
(2015) The acquisition of prosody in American Sign Language. Language, 91(3), 144–168.
Brooks, R., & Meltzoff, A. N.
(2002) The importance of eyes: How infants interpret adult looking behavior. Developmental Psychology, 38, 958–966. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Curtin, S., Campbell, J., & Hufnagle, D.
(2012) Mapping novel labels to actions: How the rhythm of words guides infants’ learning. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 112, 127–140. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cutler, A., & Butterfield, S.
(1992) Rhythmic cues to speech segmentation: Evidence from juncture misperception. Journal of Memory and Language, 31, 218–236. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cutler, A., & Carter, D. M.
(1987) The predominance of strong initial syllables in the English vocabulary. Computer Speech & Language, 2, 133–142. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cutler, A., & Norris, D. G.
(1988) The role of strong syllables in segmentation for lexical access. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 14, 113–121.Google Scholar
Dahan, D., Tanenhaus, M. K., & Chambers, C. G.
(2002) Accent and reference resolution in spoken-language comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 47, 292–314. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
DeCasper, A. J., & Fifer, W. P.
(1980) Of human bonding: Newborns prefer their mothers’ voices. Science, 208, 1174–1176. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
DeCasper, A. J., & Spence, M. J.
(1986) Prenatal maternal speech influences newborn’s perception of speech sounds. Infant Behavior and Development, 9, 133–150. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Diesendruck, G.
(2009) Mechanisms of word learning. In E. Hoff & M. Shatz (Eds.), Blackwell handbook of language development (pp.257–276). Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Diesendruck, G., Markson, L., Akhtar, N., & Reudor, A.
(2004) Two-year-olds’ sensitivity to speakers’ intent: An alternative account of Samuelson and Smith. Developmental Science, 7(1), 33–41. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Echols, C. H., Crowhurst, M. J., & Childers, J. B.
(1997) Perception of rhythmic units in speech by infants and adults. Journal of Memory and Language, 36, 202–225. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fantz, R. L.
(1964) Visual experience in infants: Decreased attention to familiar patterns relative to novel ones. Science, 146, 668–670. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fernald, A
(1985) Four-month-old infants prefer to listen to motherese. Infant Behavior and Development, 8, 181–195. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(1989) Intonation and communicative intent in mother’s speech to infants: Is the melody the message? Child Development, 60(6), 1497–1510. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fernald, A., & Mazzie, C.
(1991) Prosody and focus in speech to infants and adults. Developmental Psychology, 27, 209–221. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fernald, A., & Simon, T.
(1984) Expanded intonation contours in mothers’ speech to newborns. Developmental Psychology, 20, 104–113. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gerken, L., & Aslin, R. N.
(2005) Thirty years of research on infant speech perception: The legacy of Peter W. Jusczyk. Language Learning and Development, 1(1), 5–21. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Golinkoff, R. M., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Bailey, L. M., & Wenger, N. R.
(1992) Young children and adults use lexical principles to learn new nouns. Developmental Psychology, 28(1), 99–108. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hirsh-Pasek, K., Golinkoff, R. M., & Hollich, G.
(2000) An emergentist coalition model for word learning: Mapping words to obejcts is a product of the interaction of multiple cues. In R. M. Golinkoff, K. Hirsh-Pasek, L. Bloom, L. B. Smith, A. L. Woodard, N. Akhtar, M. Tomasello, & G. Hollich (Eds.), Becoming a word learner: A debate on lexical acquisition (pp. 179-186). New York: Oxford University Press. DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195130324.003.006 DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goyet, L., Millotte, S., Christophe, A., & Nazzi, T.
(2016) Processing continuous speech in infancy: From major prosodic units to isolated word forms. In J. Lidz, W. Synder, & J. Pater (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics (pp. 133–1560). Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199601264.001.0001Google Scholar
Graf Estes, K., & Bowen, S.
(2013) Learning about sounds contributes to learning about words: Effects of prosody and phonotactics on infant word learning. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 114, 405–417. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Graf Estes, K., & Hurley, K.
(2013) Infant-directed prosody helps infants map sounds to meaning. Infancy, 18(5), 797–824. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grassmann, S., & Tomasello, M.
(2007) Two-year-olds use primary sentence accent to learn new words. Journal of Child Language, 14, 23–45.Google Scholar
(2010) Prosodic stress on a word directs 24-month-olds’ attention to a contextually new referent. Journal of Pragmatics, 42(11), 3098–3105. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Johnson, E. K., & Seidl, A. H.
(2009) At 11 months, prosody still outranks statistics. Developmental Science, 12(1), 131–141. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Johnson, E. K., Seidl, A. H., & Tyler, M. D.
(2014) The edge factor in early word segmentation: Utterance-level prosody enables word form extraction by 6-month-olds. Plos One, 9(1), e83546. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jusczyk, P. W.
(1999) How infants begin to extract words from speech. Trends in Cognitive Science, 3(9), 323–328. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jusczyk, P. W., & Aslin, R. N.
(1995) Infants’ detection of the sound patterns of words in fluent speech. Cognitive Psychology, 29(1), 1–23. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jusczyk, P. W., Houston, D., & Newsome, M.
(1999) The beginnings of word segmentation in English-learning infants. Cognitive Psychology, 39, 159–207. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jusczyk, P. W., Cutler, A., & Redanz, N.
(1993) Preference for the predominant stress patters of English words. Child Development, 64, 675–687. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jusczyk, P. W., & Thompson, E. J.
(1978) Perception of a phonetic contrast in multisyllabic utterances by two-month-old infants. Perception & Psychophysics, 23, 105–109. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Höhle, B., Bijeljac-Babic, R., Herold, B., Weissenborn, J., & Nazzi, R.
(2009) Language specific prosodic preferences during the first half year of life: Evidence from German and French infants. Infant Behavior and Development, 32(3), 262–274. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ladd, D. R.
(1996) Intonational phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lehiste, I.
(1970) Suprasegmentals. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Lew-Williams, C., & Saffran, J.
(2012) All words are not created equal: Expectations about word length guide infant statistical learning. Cognition, 122, 241–246. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ma, W., Golinkoff, R., Houston, D., & Hirsh-Pasek, K.
(2011) Word learning in infant- and adult-directed speech. Language Learning and Development, 7, 209–225. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mattys, S. L., & Jusczyk, P. W.
(2001) Do infants segment words or recurring contiguous patterns? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 27(3), 644–655.Google Scholar
Mattys, S. L., Jusczyk, P. W., Luce, P. A., & Morgan, J. L.
(1999) Phonotactic and prosodic effects on word segmentation in infants. Cognitive Psychology, 38, 465–494. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mervis, C. B., & Bertrand, J.
(1994) Acquisition of the novel name-nameless category (N3C) principle. Child Development, 65, 1646–1662. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Moon, C., Panneton-Cooper, R., & Fifer, W. P.
(1993) Two-day-olds prefer their native language. Infant Behavior and Development, 16, 495–500. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Moore, C., Angelopoulos, M., & Bennett, P.
(1999) Word learning in the context of referential and salience cues. Developmental Psychology, 35(1), 60–68. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Morgan, J. L.
(1994) Converging measures of speech segmentation in preverbal infants. Infant Behavior and Development, 17, 389–403. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(1996) A rhythmic bias in preverbal speech segmentation. Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 666–688. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Morgan, J. L., & Saffran, J. R.
(1995) Emerging integration of sequential and suprasegmental information in preverbal speech segmentation. Child Development, 66, 911–936. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nazzi, T., Bertoncini, J., & Mehler, J.
(1998) Language discrimination by newborns: Toward an understanding of the role of rhythm. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 24(3), 756–766.Google Scholar
Nazzi, T., Floccia, C., & Bertoncini, J.
(1998) Discrimination of pitch contours by neonates. Infant Behavior and Development, 21(4), 779–784. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nespor, M., & Vogel, I.
(1986) Prosodic phonology. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Pierrehumbert, J., & Beckman, M.
(1988) Japanese tone structure. Linguistics Inquiry Monograph, 15 . Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Polka, L., Sundara, M., & Blue, S.
(2002) The role of language experience in word segmentation: A comparison of English, French and bilingual infants. Paper presented at the 143rd Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America: Special session in memory of Peter Jusczyk, Pittsburgh, USA.DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pons, F., & Bosch, L.
(2010) Stress pattern preference in Spanish-learning infants: The role of syllable weight. Infancy, 15(3), 223–245. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Quine, W. V. O.
(1960) Word and object. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Rose, S. A., Gottfried, A. W., Melloy-Carminar, P., & Bridger, W. H.
(1982) Familiarity and novelty preferences in infant recognition memory: Implications for information processing. Developmental Psychology, 18, 704–713. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Saffran, J., Aslin, R. N., & Newport, E.
(1996) Statistical learning by 8-month-olds. Science, 274(5294), 1926–1928. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Samuelson, L. K., & Smith, L. B.
(1998) Memory and attention make smart word learning: An alternative account of Akhtar, Carpenter and Tomasello. Child Development,1, 94–104. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Seidl, A., & Johnson, E. K.
(2006) Infant word segmentation revisited: Edge alignment facilitates target extraction. Developmental Science, 9(6), 565–573. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Selkirk, E. O.
(1978) On prosodic structure and its relation to syntactic structure. In T. Fretheim (Ed.), Nordic prosody II (pp.111–140). Trondheim: Tapir.Google Scholar
(1986) On derived domains in sentence phonology. Phonology, 3, 371–405. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Shattuck-Hufnagel, S., & Turk, A. E.
(1996) A prosody tutorial for investigators of auditory sentence processing. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 25(2), 193–247. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Shukla, M., White, K. S., & Aslin, R. N.
(2011) Prosody guides the rapid mapping of auditory word forms onto visual objects in 6-mo-old infants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(15), 6038–3043. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Song, J. Y., Demuth, K., & Morgan, J.
(2010) Effects of the acoustic properties of infant-directed speech on infant word recognition. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 128(1), 389–400 DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tanenhaus, M., Spivey-Knowlton, M., Eberhard, K., & Sedivy, J.
(1995) Integration of visual and linguistic information during spoken language comprehension. Science, 268, 1632–1634. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thiessen, E. D., & Saffran, J. R.
(2007) Learning to learn: Infants’ acquisition of stress based strategies for word segmentation. Language, Learning, and Development, 3(1), 73–100.Google Scholar
Thiessen, E. D., Hill, E. A., & Saffran, J. R.
(2005) Infant-directed speech facilitates word segmentation. Infancy, 7, 49–67. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thorson, J. C.
(2015) The development of intonation and information structure: Perceptual and productive investigations. Unpublished PhD Dissertation. Brown University.Google Scholar
Thorson, J. C., & Morgan, J. L.
(2014) Directing Toddler Attention: Intonation and Information Structure. Supplement to the Proceedings of the 38th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD) – Boston.
Tomasello, M., & Akhtar, N.
(1995) Two-year-olds use pragmatic cues to differentiate reference to objects and actions. Cognitive Development, 10, 201–224. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Turnbull, R., Royer, A. J., Ito, K., & Speer, S.
(2014) Prominence perception in and out of context. Proceedings of Speech Prosody 7 – Dublin, 1164–1168.
Waxman, S. R., & Lidz, J. L.
(2006) Early word learning. In W. Damon, & R. M. Lerner (Series Eds.) & R. Siegler, & D. Kuhn (Volume Eds.), Handbook of child psychology, Vol. 2. Cognition, perception, and language (pp.299–335). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley.Google Scholar
Weber, A., Braun, B., & Crocker, M. W.
(2006) Finding referents in time: Eye-tracking evidence for the role of contrastive accents. Language and Speech, 49(3), 367–392. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Werker, J. F., & Yeung, H.
(2005) Infant speech perception bootstraps word learning. Trends in Cognitive Science, 9(11), 519–527. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Woodward, A. L.
(2003) Infants’ developing understanding of the link between looker and object. Developmental Science, 6(3), 297–311. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yu, C., & Ballard, D. H.
(2007) A unified model of early word learning: Integrating statistical and social cues. Neurocomputing, 70, 2149–2165. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yu, K. M., Khan, S. D., & Sundara, M.
(2014) Intonational phonology in Bengali and English infant-directed speech. Proceedings of Speech Prosody 7 – Dublin, 1130–1134.
Cited by

Cited by 6 other publications

HAN, Mengru, Nivja H. DE JONG & René KAGER
2020. Pitch properties of infant-directed speech specific to word-learning contexts: a cross-linguistic investigation of Mandarin Chinese and Dutch. Journal of Child Language 47:1 ► pp. 85 ff. DOI logo
Hickok, Gregory, Jonathan Venezia & Alex Teghipco
2023. Beyond Broca: neural architecture and evolution of a dual motor speech coordination system. Brain 146:5 ► pp. 1775 ff. DOI logo
Hübscher, Iris & Pilar Prieto
2019. Gestural and Prosodic Development Act as Sister Systems and Jointly Pave the Way for Children’s Sociopragmatic Development. Frontiers in Psychology 10 DOI logo
Paillereau, Nikola, Václav Jonáš Podlipský, Filip Smolík, Šárka Šimáčková & Kateřina Chládková
2021. The development of infants’ sensitivity to native versus non‐native rhythm. Infancy 26:3 ► pp. 423 ff. DOI logo
Pronina, Mariia, Iris Hübscher, Ingrid Vilà-Giménez & Pilar Prieto
2021. Bridging the Gap Between Prosody and Pragmatics: The Acquisition of Pragmatic Prosody in the Preschool Years and Its Relation With Theory of Mind. Frontiers in Psychology 12 DOI logo
Pronina, Mariia, Pilar Prieto, Luca Bischetti & Valentina Bambini
2022. Expressive Pragmatics and Prosody in Young Preschoolers are More Closely Related to Structural Language than to Mentalizing. Language Learning and Development ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 9 may 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.