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The Development of Prosody in First Language Acquisition
Edited by Pilar Prieto and Núria Esteve-Gibert
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 23] 2018
► pp. 79–100

Chapter 5
The role of prosody in early speech segmentation and word-referent mapping

Electrophysiological evidence

| University of Barcelona, Department of Cognition, Development and Educational Psychology
| University of Barcelona, Department of Cognition, Development and Educational Psychology | Cognition and Brain Plasticity Group (Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute) IDIBELL | Institut de Recerca Sant Joan de Déu (IRSJD)
| University of Barcelona, Department of Cognition, Development and Educational Psychology | Institut de Recerca Sant Joan de Déu (IRSJD) | Institut de Neurociències, University of Barcelona
| Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Department of Neuropsychology and Department of Neurology | University of Leipzig, Medical Faculty, Clinic for Cognitive Neurology

This chapter reviews electrophysiological studies on early word-form segmentation and word-referent mapping, with a focus on the role of prosody in these early abilities closely related to vocabulary acquisition. First, we will review event-related brain potential (ERP) studies on word segmentation showing the impact of lexical stress cues, infant-directed speech (IDS) properties and melodic information on word-form extraction. Then, we will review research on word-referent mapping, revealing the scarcity of ERP studies specifically exploring the contribution of prosody in this domain. Throughout the chapter we will emphasize how electrophysiological methods offer a more fine-grained perspective of the brain processes supporting segmentation and mapping abilities, often revealing infants’ sensitivities to auditory input before overt responses from behavioral methods can be obtained.

Article outline
  • Introduction
  • The method of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in language acquisition research
  • Word segmentation
    • ERP indicators of word segmentation
    • Language-specific prosodic cues to word segmentation: lexical stress patterns
    • Properties of infant-directed speech (IDS) supporting word segmentation: Prosodic emphasis on sentence-embedded words
    • From IDS to song: How early can melodic cues contribute to word segmentation?
  • Word-referent mapping
    • ERP indicators of word-referent mapping
    • The contribution of prosody to word-referent mapping: From behavioral to ERP studies
  • Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 24 May 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.23.05tei
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