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Early Prosodic Development

Emerging intonation and phrasing in European Portuguese
  • Sónia Frota , Marisa Cruz , Nuno Matos and Marina Vigário
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Intonational Grammar in Ibero-Romance
This chapter is in the book Intonational Grammar in Ibero-Romance

Abstract

Studies of emerging prosody from the word to the phrase, integrating various sources of evidence, are scarce, and our understanding of the pathways of prosodic development is still very limited. An investigation of emerging intonation and prosodic phrasing was undertaken on the basis of production data on intonation and duration patterns from the speech of two European Portuguese children between 1;00 and 2;04. The results show that both the development of intonation and phrasing were found to precede the onset of combinatorial speech, and to coincide in time with critical points in lexical development. Prosodic phrasing evolved in three steps, by the unfolding of key prosodic levels. Implications of these results are discussed in relation to early prosodic development across languages.

Abstract

Studies of emerging prosody from the word to the phrase, integrating various sources of evidence, are scarce, and our understanding of the pathways of prosodic development is still very limited. An investigation of emerging intonation and prosodic phrasing was undertaken on the basis of production data on intonation and duration patterns from the speech of two European Portuguese children between 1;00 and 2;04. The results show that both the development of intonation and phrasing were found to precede the onset of combinatorial speech, and to coincide in time with critical points in lexical development. Prosodic phrasing evolved in three steps, by the unfolding of key prosodic levels. Implications of these results are discussed in relation to early prosodic development across languages.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Introduction vii
  4. Foreword xiii
  5. Part I. Intonation, variation and contact
  6. Task-related effects in the prosody of Spanish heritage speakers and long-term immigrants 3
  7. Pitch accent tonal alignment in declarative sentences in the Spanish of the Basque Country 25
  8. Stylistic variation in the intonation of European Portuguese teenagers and adults 45
  9. Focus and prosody in Spanish and Quechua 69
  10. Part II. Intonational modeling, syntax and pragmatics
  11. Cost of the action and social distance affect the selection of question intonation in Catalan 93
  12. Intonation modeling in cross-linguistic research 115
  13. Prosody and Emotion in Brazilian Portuguese 135
  14. The Relation between Prosody and Syntax: The case of different types of Left-Dislocations in Spanish 153
  15. The intonational meaning of polar questions in Manchego Spanish spontaneous speech 181
  16. Declarative utterances in Buenos Aires Spanish 207
  17. Towards automatic language processing and intonational labeling in European Portuguese 227
  18. Part III. Intonation, acquisition and special populations
  19. Prosodic and gestural features distinguish the intention of pointing gestures in child-directed communication 251
  20. Prosody in Portuguese Children with HighFunctioning Autism 277
  21. Early Prosodic Development 295
  22. A preliminary study of wh-questions in German and Spanish child language 325
  23. Assessment of Spanish prosody in clinical populations 351
  24. Intonation and grammar in the visual-gestural modality 369
  25. Index 387
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