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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. 271–293

Chapter 14
Children’s development of internal state prosody

| University of Massachusetts Amherst
| Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Infants have access to the prosodic aspects of their ambient language even prior to birth, but many aspects of prosody are produced and comprehended well after infancy. One of these aspects includes prosody related to internal states such as beliefs, desires, feelings and emotions. In this chapter, we review the literature on prosody related to internal states, paying special attention to prosodic meanings associated with emotions and belief states and drawing from production and comprehension studies of preschool- and school-aged children. We show that there are many parallels in the development of these two aspects of prosody, suggesting the usefulness of studying them in tandem. Implications for these findings are discussed as well as fruitful directions for future work.

Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Children’s use of prosody for conveying and perceiving emotions
  • Children’s acquisition of belief state prosody
    • Production
    • Comprehension
  • Discussion and conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 24 May 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.23.14arm
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