Beach, C. M., Katz, W. F. & Skowronski, A. (1996). Children’s processing of prosodic cues for phrasal interpretation. The Journal of Acoustical Society of America 99 (2), 1148–1160.
Presentation: Shelly
Summary: Sally
Three issues were investigated in the study: (1) whether children make use of duration and intonation to group words into phrases during sentence interpretation; (2) whether these two cues are processed independently; (3) whether the processing patterns change during the developmental process. The investigation was addressed via synthesizing two ways of reading a simple sentence fragment “pink and green and white” ([pink and (green and white)] vs. [(pink and green) and white]) in both syllable duration (5 levels) and F0 contour (3 levels). Participants included thee age groups of 20 subjects each: adults, 7-year-olds, and 5-year-olds. All of them were monolingual American English speakers, and each group was balanced in gender. Results showed that their judgments were affected by both cues, with the durational cue more predominantly used by adults than children. Moreover, to explore issue (3), three information-processing models, including the fuzzy logical cue-trading model, an additive integration model, and the non-independent model, were tested in order to know which one best fit the obtained results. Results showed that all three groups’ performance was best described by the fuzzy logical cue-trading model, which indicates that by five years of age, children are sensitive to the same acoustic-prosodic cues adults use in parsing boundaries. On the other hand, the non-independence model failed to support the traditional view that children tend to use holistic processing, while adults adopt an analytical mechanism. The authors believed that this model-theoretic coupling approach is promising in that it permits the analysis of perceptual capacity across different stages of the developmental process.
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