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. 59–77

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.
Published online: 24 May 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.23.04tho
References

References

Akhtar, N., Carpenter, M., & Tomasello, M.
(1996) The role of discourse novelty in early word learning. Child Development, 67, 635–645. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Arnold, J.
(2008) THE BACON not the bacon: How children and adults understand accented and unaccented noun phrases. Cognition, 108, 69–99. CrossrefGoogle 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. CrossrefGoogle 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. CrossrefGoogle 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. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Brent, M. R., & Siskind, J. M.
(2001) The role of exposure to isolated words in early vocabulary development. Cognition, 81, B33–B44. CrossrefGoogle 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. CrossrefGoogle 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. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cutler, A., & Butterfield, S.
(1992) Rhythmic cues to speech segmentation: Evidence from juncture misperception. Journal of Memory and Language, 31, 218–236. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cutler, A., & Carter, D. M.
(1987) The predominance of strong initial syllables in the English vocabulary. Computer Speech & Language, 2, 133–142. CrossrefGoogle 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. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
DeCasper, A. J., & Fifer, W. P.
(1980) Of human bonding: Newborns prefer their mothers’ voices. Science, 208, 1174–1176. CrossrefGoogle 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. CrossrefGoogle 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. CrossrefGoogle 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. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Fantz, R. L.
(1964) Visual experience in infants: Decreased attention to familiar patterns relative to novel ones. Science, 146, 668–670. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Fernald, A.
(1985) Four-month-old infants prefer to listen to motherese. Infant Behavior and Development, 8, 181–195. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(1989) Intonation and communicative intent in mother’s speech to infants: Is the melody the message? Child Development, 60(6), 1497–1510. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Fernald, A., & Mazzie, C.
(1991) Prosody and focus in speech to infants and adults. Developmental Psychology, 27, 209–221. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Fernald, A., & Simon, T.
(1984) Expanded intonation contours in mothers’ speech to newborns. Developmental Psychology, 20, 104–113. CrossrefGoogle 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. CrossrefGoogle 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. CrossrefGoogle 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 CrossrefGoogle 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. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Graf Estes, K., & Hurley, K.
(2013) Infant-directed prosody helps infants map sounds to meaning. Infancy, 18(5), 797–824. CrossrefGoogle 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. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, E. K., & Seidl, A. H.
(2009) At 11 months, prosody still outranks statistics. Developmental Science, 12(1), 131–141. CrossrefGoogle 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. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Jusczyk, P. W.
(1999) How infants begin to extract words from speech. Trends in Cognitive Science, 3(9), 323–328. CrossrefGoogle 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. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Jusczyk, P. W., Houston, D., & Newsome, M.
(1999) The beginnings of word segmentation in English-learning infants. Cognitive Psychology, 39, 159–207. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Jusczyk, P. W., Cutler, A., & Redanz, N.
(1993) Preference for the predominant stress patters of English words. Child Development, 64, 675–687. CrossrefGoogle 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. CrossrefGoogle 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. CrossrefGoogle 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. CrossrefGoogle 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. CrossrefGoogle 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. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Mervis, C. B., & Bertrand, J.
(1994) Acquisition of the novel name-nameless category (N3C) principle. Child Development, 65, 1646–1662. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Moon, C., Panneton-Cooper, R., & Fifer, W. P.
(1993) Two-day-olds prefer their native language. Infant Behavior and Development, 16, 495–500. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Moore, C., Angelopoulos, M., & Bennett, P.
(1999) Word learning in the context of referential and salience cues. Developmental Psychology, 35(1), 60–68. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Morgan, J. L.
(1994) Converging measures of speech segmentation in preverbal infants. Infant Behavior and Development, 17, 389–403. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(1996) A rhythmic bias in preverbal speech segmentation. Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 666–688. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Morgan, J. L., & Saffran, J. R.
(1995) Emerging integration of sequential and suprasegmental information in preverbal speech segmentation. Child Development, 66, 911–936. CrossrefGoogle 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. CrossrefGoogle 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.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Pons, F., & Bosch, L.
(2010) Stress pattern preference in Spanish-learning infants: The role of syllable weight. Infancy, 15(3), 223–245. CrossrefGoogle 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. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Saffran, J., Aslin, R. N., & Newport, E.
(1996) Statistical learning by 8-month-olds. Science, 274(5294), 1926–1928. CrossrefGoogle 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. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Seidl, A., & Johnson, E. K.
(2006) Infant word segmentation revisited: Edge alignment facilitates target extraction. Developmental Science, 9(6), 565–573. CrossrefGoogle 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. CrossrefGoogle 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. CrossrefGoogle 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. CrossrefGoogle 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 CrossrefGoogle 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. CrossrefGoogle 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. CrossrefGoogle 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. CrossrefGoogle 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. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Werker, J. F., & Yeung, H.
(2005) Infant speech perception bootstraps word learning. Trends in Cognitive Science, 9(11), 519–527. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Woodward, A. L.
(2003) Infants’ developing understanding of the link between looker and object. Developmental Science, 6(3), 297–311. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Yu, C., & Ballard, D. H.
(2007) A unified model of early word learning: Integrating statistical and social cues. Neurocomputing, 70, 2149–2165. CrossrefGoogle 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 3 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. Crossref 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 Crossref 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. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 12 july 2021. 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.