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Cues to dialectal discrimination in early infancy

A look at prosodic, rhythmic and segmental properties in utterances from two Catalan dialects
  • Marta Ortega-Llebaria and Laura Bosch
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The Phonetics–Phonology Interface
This chapter is in the book The Phonetics–Phonology Interface

Abstract

Cross-dialect differences might be restricted to prosodic properties, but language dialects can also differ at the segmental level affecting vowel and/or consonantal sound repertoires. Examining infants’ ability for crossdialectal discrimination can be informative about the early availability of cues other than rhythm or intonation. Preliminary data from five-month-old Catalanlearning infants exposed to the Eastern variant of this language spoken in Barcelona revealed their ability to differentiate it from the Western dialect, which differs in the number of vowels occurring in unstressed positions. In order to disentangle the effects of rhythm from those of segmental statistics, vowel distribution and rhythmic patterns of the utterances used in the discrimination experiment were analyzed. Results show that vowel metrics, rather than global rhythm metrics, are most successful at classifying the utterances into these two dialects. Information about the distribution of vowels in the native dialect might thus be available early in development and facilitate dialectal discrimination.

Abstract

Cross-dialect differences might be restricted to prosodic properties, but language dialects can also differ at the segmental level affecting vowel and/or consonantal sound repertoires. Examining infants’ ability for crossdialectal discrimination can be informative about the early availability of cues other than rhythm or intonation. Preliminary data from five-month-old Catalanlearning infants exposed to the Eastern variant of this language spoken in Barcelona revealed their ability to differentiate it from the Western dialect, which differs in the number of vowels occurring in unstressed positions. In order to disentangle the effects of rhythm from those of segmental statistics, vowel distribution and rhythmic patterns of the utterances used in the discrimination experiment were analyzed. Results show that vowel metrics, rather than global rhythm metrics, are most successful at classifying the utterances into these two dialects. Information about the distribution of vowels in the native dialect might thus be available early in development and facilitate dialectal discrimination.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Foreword & acknowledgments vii
  4. Editors’ introduction ix
  5. Part I First and second language acquisition
  6. Devil or angel in the details? 3
  7. Effects of Spanish use on the production of Catalan vowels by early Spanish-Catalan bilinguals 33
  8. Cues to dialectal discrimination in early infancy 55
  9. Phonology versus phonetics in loanword adaptations 71
  10. Part II Prosody
  11. A preliminary study of penultimate accentuation in French 93
  12. Sentence modality and tempo in Neapolitan Italian 109
  13. Glottalization at phrase boundaries in Tuscan and Roman Italian 125
  14. Part III Segments
  15. Acoustic analysis of syllable-final /k/ in Northern Peninsular Spanish 151
  16. The phonetic basis of a phonological pattern 171
  17. The production of rhotics in onset clusters by Spanish monolinguals and Spanish-Basque bilinguals 193
  18. Part IV Methodology
  19. Secondary correlates of question signaling in Manchego Spanish 211
  20. Modeling prosody and rhythmic distributions in Spanish speech groups 239
  21. Categories and gradience in intonation 259
  22. Subject Index 285
https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.335.03ort

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Foreword & acknowledgments vii
  4. Editors’ introduction ix
  5. Part I First and second language acquisition
  6. Devil or angel in the details? 3
  7. Effects of Spanish use on the production of Catalan vowels by early Spanish-Catalan bilinguals 33
  8. Cues to dialectal discrimination in early infancy 55
  9. Phonology versus phonetics in loanword adaptations 71
  10. Part II Prosody
  11. A preliminary study of penultimate accentuation in French 93
  12. Sentence modality and tempo in Neapolitan Italian 109
  13. Glottalization at phrase boundaries in Tuscan and Roman Italian 125
  14. Part III Segments
  15. Acoustic analysis of syllable-final /k/ in Northern Peninsular Spanish 151
  16. The phonetic basis of a phonological pattern 171
  17. The production of rhotics in onset clusters by Spanish monolinguals and Spanish-Basque bilinguals 193
  18. Part IV Methodology
  19. Secondary correlates of question signaling in Manchego Spanish 211
  20. Modeling prosody and rhythmic distributions in Spanish speech groups 239
  21. Categories and gradience in intonation 259
  22. Subject Index 285
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