Chapter published in:
The Development of Prosody in First Language AcquisitionEdited 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
Jill C. Thorson
| University of New Hampshire
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
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. 
Arnold, J.
(2008) THE BACON not the bacon: How children and adults
understand accented and unaccented noun
phrases. Cognition, 108, 69–99.
Aslin, R. N., Saffran, J., & Newport, E.
(1998) Computation of conditional probability statistics
by 8-month-old infants. Psychological Science, 9(4), 321–324.
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.
Bloom, P.
(2000) How children learn the meanings of words. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bolinger, D. L.
(1989) Intonation and its uses: Melody in grammar and
discourse. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
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.
Brent, M. R., & Siskind, J. M.
(2001) The role of exposure to isolated words in early
vocabulary development. Cognition, 81, B33–B44.
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.
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.
Cutler, A., & Butterfield, S.
(1992) Rhythmic cues to speech segmentation: Evidence
from juncture misperception. Journal of Memory and Language, 31, 218–236.
Cutler, A., & Carter, D. M.
(1987) The predominance of strong initial syllables in
the English vocabulary. Computer Speech & Language, 2, 133–142.
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.
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.
DeCasper, A. J., & Fifer, W. P.
(1980) Of human bonding: Newborns prefer their mothers’
voices. Science, 208, 1174–1176.
DeCasper, A. J., & Spence, M. J.
(1986) Prenatal maternal speech influences newborn’s
perception of speech sounds. Infant Behavior and Development, 9, 133–150.
Diesendruck, G.
(2009) Mechanisms of word learning. In E. Hoff & M. Shatz (Eds.), Blackwell handbook of language development (pp.257–276). Oxford: Blackwell.
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.
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.
Fantz, R. L.
(1964) Visual experience in infants: Decreased attention
to familiar patterns relative to novel ones. Science, 146, 668–670.
Fernald, A.
(1985) Four-month-old infants prefer to listen to
motherese. Infant Behavior and Development, 8, 181–195.
(1989) Intonation and communicative intent in mother’s
speech to infants: Is the melody the
message? Child Development, 60(6), 1497–1510.
Fernald, A., & Mazzie, C.
(1991) Prosody and focus in speech to infants and
adults. Developmental Psychology, 27, 209–221.
Fernald, A., & Simon, T.
(1984) Expanded intonation contours in mothers’ speech
to newborns. Developmental Psychology, 20, 104–113.
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.
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.
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
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/9780199601264.001.0001
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.
Graf Estes, K., & Hurley, K.
(2013) Infant-directed prosody helps infants map sounds
to meaning. Infancy, 18(5), 797–824.
Grassmann, S., & Tomasello, M.
(2007) Two-year-olds use primary sentence accent to
learn new words. Journal of Child Language, 14, 23–45.
(2010) Prosodic stress on a word directs 24-month-olds’
attention to a contextually new referent. Journal of Pragmatics, 42(11), 3098–3105.
Johnson, E. K., & Seidl, A. H.
(2009) At 11 months, prosody still outranks
statistics. Developmental Science, 12(1), 131–141.
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.
Jusczyk, P. W.
(1999) How infants begin to extract words from
speech. Trends in Cognitive Science, 3(9), 323–328.
Jusczyk, P. W., & Aslin, R. N.
(1995) Infants’ detection of the sound patterns of words
in fluent speech. Cognitive Psychology, 29(1), 1–23.
Jusczyk, P. W., Houston, D., & Newsome, M.
(1999) The beginnings of word segmentation in
English-learning infants. Cognitive Psychology, 39, 159–207.
Jusczyk, P. W., Cutler, A., & Redanz, N.
(1993) Preference for the predominant stress patters of
English words. Child Development, 64, 675–687.
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.
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.
Ladd, D. R.
(1996) Intonational phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lehiste, I.
(1970) Suprasegmentals. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Lew-Williams, C., & Saffran, J.
(2012) All words are not created equal: Expectations
about word length guide infant statistical
learning. Cognition, 122, 241–246.
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.
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.
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.
Mervis, C. B., & Bertrand, J.
(1994) Acquisition of the novel name-nameless category
(N3C) principle. Child Development, 65, 1646–1662.
Moon, C., Panneton-Cooper, R., & Fifer, W. P.
(1993) Two-day-olds prefer their native
language. Infant Behavior and Development, 16, 495–500.
Moore, C., Angelopoulos, M., & Bennett, P.
(1999) Word learning in the context of referential and
salience cues. Developmental Psychology, 35(1), 60–68.
Morgan, J. L.
(1994) Converging measures of speech segmentation in
preverbal infants. Infant Behavior and Development, 17, 389–403.
(1996) A rhythmic bias in preverbal speech
segmentation. Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 666–688.
Morgan, J. L., & Saffran, J. R.
(1995) Emerging integration of sequential and
suprasegmental information in preverbal speech
segmentation. Child Development, 66, 911–936.
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.
Nazzi, T., Floccia, C., & Bertoncini, J.
(1998) Discrimination of pitch contours by
neonates. Infant Behavior and Development, 21(4), 779–784.
Nespor, M., & Vogel, I.
(1986) Prosodic phonology. Dordrecht: Foris.
Pierrehumbert, J., & Beckman, M.
(1988) Japanese tone structure. Linguistics Inquiry
Monograph, 15
. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
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.
Pons, F., & Bosch, L.
(2010) Stress pattern preference in Spanish-learning
infants: The role of syllable weight. Infancy, 15(3), 223–245.
Quine, W. V. O.
(1960) Word and object. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
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.
Saffran, J., Aslin, R. N., & Newport, E.
(1996) Statistical learning by
8-month-olds. Science, 274(5294), 1926–1928.
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.
Seidl, A., & Johnson, E. K.
(2006) Infant word segmentation revisited: Edge
alignment facilitates target extraction. Developmental Science, 9(6), 565–573.
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.
(1986) On derived domains in sentence
phonology. Phonology, 3, 371–405.
Shattuck-Hufnagel, S., & Turk, A. E.
(1996) A prosody tutorial for investigators of auditory
sentence processing. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 25(2), 193–247.
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.
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
Tanenhaus, M., Spivey-Knowlton, M., Eberhard, K., & Sedivy, J.
(1995) Integration of visual and linguistic information
during spoken language comprehension. Science, 268, 1632–1634.
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.
Thiessen, E. D., Hill, E. A., & Saffran, J. R.
(2005) Infant-directed speech facilitates word
segmentation. Infancy, 7, 49–67.
Thorson, J. C.
(2015) The development of intonation and information structure:
Perceptual and productive investigations. Unpublished PhD Dissertation. Brown University.
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.
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.
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.
Werker, J. F., & Yeung, H.
(2005) Infant speech perception bootstraps word
learning. Trends in Cognitive Science, 9(11), 519–527.
Woodward, A. L.
(2003) Infants’ developing understanding of the link
between looker and object. Developmental Science, 6(3), 297–311.
Yu, C., & Ballard, D. H.
(2007) A unified model of early word learning:
Integrating statistical and social cues. Neurocomputing, 70, 2149–2165.
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 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.
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
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 24 march 2020. 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.