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. 247–270

Gradual development of focus prosody and affect prosody comprehension

A proposal for a holistic approach

| Ohio State University
Excellence in communication skills requires an ability to appropriately represent the discourse structure including focus, as well as good comprehension of speaker affect. Both focus and affect are communicated in large part through prosody, so comprehension and production of the accompanying prosody is essential. However, past studies on focus prosody have been both theoretically and methodologically separated from the research on affect prosody. (In this chapter, I use the term ‘focus prosody’ to refer to prosodic phenomena that are either produced or perceived as the cue to a specific part of speech that conveys the focal content of a message. This includes ‘narrow focus’, which is defined in terms of the informational scope (e.g., answers to Wh-questions), and ‘contrastive focus’, which is a subtype of narrow focus that evokes interpretational alternatives.) This chapter argues that the suggested difference in the developmental trajectory (i.e., focus prosody develops slower as compared to affect prosody) may be an artifact of the perspective divergence, and points out that the mastery of prosodic skills in both these domains must be necessarily gradual – though they may not develop hand-in-hand. A holistic approach that considers the interaction between affect prosody and focus prosody is proposed as a future direction of the research on prosodic development within and across individuals.
Published online: 24 May 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.23.13ito
References

References

Arnold, J. E.
(2008) THE BACON not the bacon: How children and adults understand accented and unaccented noun phrases. Cognition, 108, 69–99. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Baddeley, A. D., & Hitch, G.
(1974) Working memory. The Psychology of Learning and Motivation: Advances in Research and Theory, 8, 47–89. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Banse, R., & Scherer, K. R.
(1996) Acoustic profiles in vocal emotion expression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70, 614–636. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Beckman, M. E.
(1996) The parsing of prosody. Language and Cognitive Processes, 11, 17–67. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Beckman, M. E., & Pierrehumbert, J. B.
(1986) Intonational structure in Japanese and English, Phonology Yearbook, 3, 255–309. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Belyk, M., & Brown, S.
(2013) Perception of affective and linguistic prosody: An ALE meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 9, 1395–1403. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Berman, J. M., Chambers, C. G., & Graham, S. A.
(2010) Preschoolers’ appreciation of speaker vocal affect as a cue to referential intent. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 107(2), 87–99. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2016) Preschoolers’ real-time coordination of vocal and facial emotional information. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 142, 391–399. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bolinger, D.
(1978) Intonation across languages. In J. H. Greenberg, C. A. Ferguson & E. Moravcsik (Eds.), Universals of human language: Phonology (Vol. 2, pp.471–524). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Bull, D. H., Eilers, R. E., & Oller, D. K.
(1984) Infants’ discrimination of intensity variation in multisyllabic stimuli. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 76, 13–17. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Chen, A.
(2014) Production-comprehension Asymmetry: Individual differences in the acquisition of prosody focus-marking. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Speech Prosody – Dublin, 423–427.
Cole, J., Mo, Y., & Hasegawa-Johnson, M.
(2010) Signal-based and expectation-based factors in the perception of prosodic prominence. Laboratory Phonology, 1(2), 425–452. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cooper, R. P., & Aslin, R. N.
(1990) Preference for infant-directed speech in the first month after birth. Child Development, 61, 1584–1595. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cutler, A., & Swinney, D. A.
(1987) Prosody and the development of comprehension. Journal of Child Language, 14, 145–167. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cruttenden, A.
(1974) An experiment involving comprehension of intonation in children from 7 to 10. Journal of Child Language, 1, 221–232. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(1985) Intonation comprehension in ten-yea-olds. Journal of Child Language 12, 643–661. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Crystal, D.
(1979) Prosodic development. In P. Fletcher, & M. Garman (Eds.), Language acquisition: Studies in first language development (pp.33–48). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Edwards, J., Pattison, P. E., Jackson, H. J., & Wales, R. J.
(2001) Facial affect and affective prosody recognition in first-episode schizophrenia. Schizophrenia Research, 48, 235–253. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Demenescu, L. R., Kato, Y., & Mathiak, K.
(2015) Neural processing of emotional prosody across the adult lifespan. BioMed Research International. Article ID 590216.Crossref
Durand, K., Gallay, M., Seigneuric, A., Robichon, F., & Baudouin, J. Y.
(2007) The development of facial emotion recognition: The role of configural information. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 97, 14–27. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Dykens, E. M.
(2003) Anxiety, fears, and phobias in persons with Williams syndrome. Developmental Neuropsychology, 23, 291–316. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Eilers, R. E., Bull, D. H., Oller, D. K., & Lewis, D. C.
(1984) The discrimination of vowel duration by infants. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 75, 1213–1218. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ethofer, T., Bretscher, J., Gschwind, M., Kreifelts, B., Wildgruber, D., & Vuilleumier, P.
(2012) Emotional voice areas: anatomic location, functional properties, and structural connections revealed by combined fMRI/DTI. Cerebral Cortex, 221, 191–200. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ethofer, T., Kreifelts, B., Wiethoff, S., Wolf, J., Grodd, W., Vuilleumier, P., & Wildgruber, D.
(2009) Differential influences of emotion, task, and novelty on brain regions underlying the processing of speech melody. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 217, 1255–1268. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Fedorenko, E., Gibson, E., & Rhode, D.
(2006) The nature of working memory in linguistic, arithmetic, and spatial integration processes. Journal of Memory and Language, 56, 246–269. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Fernald, A.
(1985) Four-month-old infants prefer to listen to motherese. Infant Behavior and Development, 8, 181–195. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(1993) Approval and disapproval: Infant responsiveness to vocal affect in familiar and unfamiliar languages. Child Development, 64, 657–674. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2004) Hearing, listening, and understanding: Auditory development in infancy. In G. Bremner, & A. Fogel (Eds.), Blackwell handbook of infant development (pp.35–70). Oxford: Blackwell. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Fernald, A., & Kuhl, P.
(1987) Acoustic determinants of infant preference for motherese speech. Infant Behavior and Development, 10, 279–293. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Fernald, A., & Mazzie, C.
(1991 Prosody and focus in speech to infants and adults. Developmental Psychology, 27(2), 209–221. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Fernald, A., Taeschner, T., Dunn, J., Papousek, M., de Boysson-Bardies, B., & Fukui, I.
(1989) A cross-language study of prosodic modifications in mothers’ and fathers’ speech to preverbal infants. Journal of Child Language, 16(3), 477–501. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Fernandez, R., & Picard, R.
(2011) Recognizing affect from speech prosody using hierarchical graphical models. Speech Communication, 53, 1088–1103. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Flom, R., & Bahrick, L. E.
(2007) The development of infant discrimination of affect in multimodal and unimodal stimulation: The role of intersensory redundancy. Developmental Psychology, 431, 238–252. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Fraundorf, S. H., Watson, D. G., & Benjamin, A. S.
(2010) Recognition memory reveals just how CONTRASTIVE contrastive accenting really is. Journal of Memory and Language, 63, 367–386. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2012) The effects of age on the strategic use of pitch accents in memory for discourse: A processing-resource account. Psychology and Aging, 27(1), 88–98. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Graf Estes, K., & Hurley, K.
(2013) Infant-directed prosody helps infants map sounds to meanings. Infancy, 18(5), 797–824. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Grandjean, D., Sander, D., Pourtois, G., Schwartz, S., Seghier, M., Scherer, K. R., & Vuilleumier, P.
(2005) The voices of wrath: Brain responses to angry prosody in meaningless speech. Nature Neuroscience, 82, 145–146. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Grassmann, S., & Tomasello, M.
(2007) Two-year-olds use primary sentence accent to learn new words. Journal of Child Language, 34, 677–687. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2010) Prosodic stress on a word directs 24-month-olds’ attention to a contextually new referent. Journal of Pragmatics, 42, 3098–3105.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Grossmann, T., Striano, T., & Friederici, A. D.
(2005) Infants’ electric brain responses to emotional prosody. Neuroreport, 16, 1825–1828. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hargrove, P. M.
(2013) Pursuing prosody interventions. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 27, 647–660. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hirschberg, J.
(2002) The pragmatics of intonational meaning. Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2002 – Aix-en-Provence, 65–68.Google Scholar
Höhle, B., Bijeljac-Babic, R., Herold, B., Weissenborn, J., & Nazzi, T.
(2009) Language specific prosodic preferences during the first half year of life: Evidence from German and French infants. Infant Behavior and Development, 32, 262–274. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hornby, P.
(1971) Surface structure and the topic-comment distinction: A developmental study. Child Development, 42, 1975–1988. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hornby, P., & Hass, W.
(1970) Use of contrastive stress by preschool children. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 13, 395–399. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Igualada, A., Esteve-Gibert, N., & Prieto, P.
(2017) “Beat gestures improve word recall in 3- to 5- year- old children”. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 156: 99–112.Google Scholar
Ito, K., & Martens, M.
(2017) Contrast-marking prosodic emphasis in Williams syndrome: results of detailed phonetic analysis. International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders, 52, 46–58.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ito, K.
(2014) Children’s pragmatic use of prosodic prominence. In D. Matthews (Ed.), Pragmatic development in first language acquisition (pp.199–218). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Ito, K., Bibyk, S., Wagner, L., & Speer, S. R.
(2014a) Interpretation of contrastive pitch accent in 6- to 11-year-old English speaking children and adults. Journal of Child Language, 41(1), 84–110. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ito, K., Jincho, N., Minai, U., Yamane, N., & Mazuka, R.
(2012) Intonation facilitates contrast resolution: Evidence from Japanese adults & 6-year olds. Journal of Memory and Language, 66(1), 265–284. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ito, K., Martens, M., & McKenna, E.
(2014b, March). Processing of pitch prominence in Williams syndrome. Talk presented at 27th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Columbus, USA.
Ito, K., Turnbull, R., & Speer, S. R.
(2017) Allophonic tunes of contrast: Lab and spontaneous speech lead to equivalent fixation responses in museum visitors. Laboratory Phonology, 8(1): 6, 1–29.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Jun, S-A.
(Ed.) (2005) Prosodic typology: The phonology of intonation and phrasing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Jusczyk, P. W.
(1997) The discovery of spoken language. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Jusczyk, P. W., Cutler, A., & Redanz, N.
(1993) Preference for the predominant stress patterns of English words. Child Development, 64, 675–687. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Juslin, P. N., & Laukka, P.
(2001) Impact of intended emotion intensity on cue utilization and decoding accuracy in vocal expression of emotion. Emotion, 1, 381–412. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Katz, G., Cohn, J., & Moore, C.
(1996) A combination of vocal F0 dynamic and summary features discriminates between three pragmatic categories of infant-directed speech. Child Development, 67, 205–217.Google Scholar
King, J., & Just, M. A.
(1991) Individual differences in syntactic processing: The role of working memory. Journal of Memory and Language, 30, 580–602. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kuhl, P. K., Stevens, E., Hayashi, A., Deguchi, T., Kiritani, S., & Iverson, P.
(2006) Infants show a facilitation effect for native language phonetic perception between 6 and 12 months. Developmental Science, 9, F13–F21. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kurumada, C.
(2013) Navigating variability in the linguistic signal: Learning to interpret contrastive prosody. Unpublished PhD dissertation. Stanford University.Google Scholar
Kurumada, C., Brown, M., Bibyk, S., Pontillo, D., & Tanenhaus, M. K.
(2014) Is it or isn’t it: Listeners make rapid use of prosody to infer speaker meanings. Cognition, 133, 335–342. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Laukka, P., Juslin, P., & Bresin, R.
(2005) A dimensional approach to vocal expression of emotion. Cognition & Emotion, 19, 633–653. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lee, E-K., & Fraundorf, S.
(2016) Effects of contrastive accents in memory for L2 discourse. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 20(5), 1063–1079. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1366728916000638Google Scholar
Lee, E-K., & Snedeker, J.
(2016) Effects of contrastive accents on children’s discourse comprehension. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 23, 1589–1595.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ladd, R. D.
(2008) Intonational phonology (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ma, W., Golinkoff, R. M., Houston, D., & Hirsh-Pasek, K.
(2011) Word learning in infant- and adult-directed speech. Language Learning and Development, 7, 209–225. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
MacWhinney, B., & Bates, E.
(1978) Sentential devices for conveying givenness and newness: A cross-cultural development study. Journal of Verbal Learning Verbal, 17, 539–558. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Marcus, G. F., Vijayan, S., Bandi Rao, S., & Vishton P. M.
(1999) Rule learning by 7-month-old infants. Science, 283, 77–80. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Nazzi, T., Jusczyk, P. W., & Johnson, E. K.
(2000) Language discrimination by English-learning 5-month-olds: Effects of rhythm and familiarity. Journal of Memory and Language, 43, 1–19. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Oudeyer, P-Y.
(2003) The production and recognition of emotion in speech: Features and algorithms. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 59, 157–183. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Owren, M. J., & Rendall, D.
(1997) An affect-conditioning model of nonhuman primate vocalizations. In D. W. Owings, M. D. Beecher, & N. S. Thompson (Eds.), Perspectives in ethology (Vol. 12, pp.299–346). New York, NY: Plenum Press.Google Scholar
Peppé, S. J. E.
(2009) Aspects of identifying prosodic impairment. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 11(4), 332–338. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Peppé, S., & McCann, J.
(2003) Assessing intonation and prosody in children with atypical language development: The PEPS-C test and the revised version. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 17, 345–354. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Pihan, H., Tabert, M., Assuras, S., & Borod, J.
(2008) Unattended emotional intonations modulate linguistic prosody processing. Brain and Language, 105, 141–147. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Prencipe, A., Kesek, A., Cohen, J., Lamm, C., Lewis, M. D., & Zelazo, P. D.
(2011) Development of hot and cool executive function during the transition to adolescence. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 108, 621–637. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ross, E. D.
(1981) The aprosodias: functional-anatomic organization of the affective components of language in the right hemisphere. Archives of Neurology, 38, 561–569. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Russell J. A.
(1980) A circumplex model of affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39, 1161–1178. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Sakkalou, E., & Gattis, M.
(2012) Infants infer intentions from prosody. Cognitive Development, 27, 1–16. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Saffran, J. R., Aslin, R. N., & Newport, E. L.
(1996) Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science, 274, 1926–1928. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Sauter, D. A., Eisner, F., Calder, A. J., & Scott, S. K.
(2010) Perceptual cues in nonverbal vocal expressions of emotion. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63(11), 2251–2272 CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Scherer, K. R., & Kappas, A.
(1988) Primate vocal expression of affective state. In D. Todt, P. Goedeking, & D. Symmes (Eds.), Primate vocal communication (pp.171–194). Berlin: Springer. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Schuller, B., Steidl, S., & Batliner, A.
(2009) The INTERSPEECH 2009 emotion challenge. Proceedings of the 10th International Speech Communication Association Annual Conference – Brighton, 312–315.
Schuller, B., Steidl, S., Batliner, A., Burkhardt, F., Devillers, L., Müller, C., & Narayanan, S.
(2010) THE INTERSPEECH 2010 paralinguistic challenge. Proceedings of the 11th International Speech Communication Association Annual Conference – Chiba, 2794–2797.
Sekerina, I. E., & Trueswell, J. C.
(2012) Interactive processing of contrastive expressions by Russian children. First Language, 32(1–2), 63–87. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Shic, F., Macari, S., & Chawarska, K.
(2014) Speech disturbs face scanning in 6-month-old infants who develop Autism Spectrum Disorder. Biological Psychiatry, 75, 231–237. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Shukla, M., White, K. S., & Aslin, R. N.
(2011) Prosody guids the rapid mapping of auditory word forms onto visual objects in 6-mo-old infants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108, 6038–6043.
Solan, L.
(1980) Contrastive stress and children’s interpretation of pronouns. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 23, 688–698. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Thiessen, E. D., Hill, E. A., & Saffran, J. R.
(2005) Infant-directed speech facilitates word segmentation. Infancy, 7, 53–71. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Tomalski, P.
(2015) Developmental trajectory of audiovisual speech integration in early infancy. A review of studies using the McGurk paradigm. Psychology of Language and Communication, 19, 77–100. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Trueswell, J. C., Sekerina, I., Hill, N. M., & Logrip, M. L.
(1999) The kindergarten-path effect: Studying on-line sentence processing in young children. Cognition, 73, 89–134. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Trueswell, J. C., & Tanenhaus, M. K.
(2005) Approaches to studying world-situated language use. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Turnbull, R.
(2016) The role of predictability in intonational variability. Language and Speech, 60, 123–153.CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Turnbull, R., Royer, A., Ito, K., & Speer, S. R.
(2017) Prominence perception is dependent on phonology, semantics, and awareness of discourse. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience. DOI:CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Vaillant-Molina, M., Bahrick, L. E., & Flom, R.
(2013) Young infants match facial and vocal emotional expressions of other infants. Infancy, 18(suppl. 1), E97–E111. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Voyer, D., Thibodeau, S-H., & Delong, B. J.
(2014) Context, contrast, and tone of voice in auditory sarcasm perception. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 45, 29–53. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Vulchanova, M., Foyn, C. H., Nilsen, R. A., & Sigmundsson, H.
(2014) Links between phonological memory, first language competence and second language competence in 10-year-old children. Learning and Individual Differences, 35, 87–95. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Walker A. S.
(1982) Intermodal perception of expressive behaviors by human infants. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 33, 514–535. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Walker-Andrews, A. S.
(1998) Emotions and social development: infants' recognition of emotions in others. Pediatrics, 102 (5 Suppl E), 1268–1271.Google Scholar
(1997) Infants’ perception of expressive behaviors: Differentiation of multimodal information. Psychological Bulletin, 121, 437–456. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Walker-Andrews, A. S., & Grolnick W.
(1983) Discrimination of vocal expression by young infants. Infant Behavior & Development, 6, 491–498. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Walker-Andrews A. S., & Lennon, E.
(1991) Infants’ discrimination of vocal expressions: Contributions of auditory and visual information. Infant Behavior & Development, 14, 131–142. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Wells, B., Peppé, S., & Goulandris, N.
(2004) Intonation development from five to thirteen. Journal of Child Language, 31, 749–778. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Werker, J. F., & Tees, R.
(2002) Cross-language speech perception: Evidence for perceptual reorganization during the first year of life. Infant Behavior and Development, 25, 121–133. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Wildgruber, D., Ackermann, H., Kreifelts, B., & Ethofer, T.
(2006) Cerebral processing of linguistic and emotional prosody: fMRI studies. Progress in Brain Research, 156, 249–268. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Zelazo, P. D., & Müller, U.
(2002) Executive function in typical and atypical development. In U. Goswami (Ed.), Handbook of childhood cognitive development (pp.445–469). Oxford: Blackwell. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by other publications

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

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 31 october 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.