2007/08/01

Seidl, A. (2007). Infants' use and weighting of prosodic cues in clause segmentation. Journal of Memory and Language, 57, 24-48.

Presentation: Shelly
Summary: Elisa

According to previous studies, acoustic correlates of syntactic boundaries in the speech stream may provide infants with clues to syntactic boundaries. This study aims to investigate two research questions. First, whether 6-month-old babies weight prosodic cues, such as pre-boundary length, pitch, and pause in the same way as adult native speakers of English? Second, which cue is the most weighted by 6-month-old babies? Exp 1 showed that infants listen longer to clausal sequences than to non-clausal sequences. Exp 2 indicated that Infants are able to segment clauses on the basis of cues other than pause. Exps 3 & 4 showed that pitch is a necessary cue for clause segmentation. Exps 5, 6 & 7 found that pre-boundary length is not necessary or sufficient. Exp 8 reported that pitch is a necessary cue, but pitch alone cannot provide sufficient information without other cues. It is suggested that infants attend to both dynamic cues and static cues. Both ease of perception and language specificity can influence infants. Besides, prosody is crucial to the segmentation of clauses in very young infant.