Mothers are less efficient in employing prosodic disambiguation in child-directed speech than non-mothers : is there a trade-off between affective and linguistic prosody?
| dc.contributor.author | Schaeffler, Sonja | |
| dc.contributor.author | Kempe, Vera | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2018-06-29T15:54:38Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2018-06-29T15:54:38Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2007-08 | |
| dc.description.abstract | This study examines prosodic disambiguation in child-directed (CD) speech. Twenty-four mothers addressed syntactically ambiguous sentences to their 2;0 to 3;8 year old child and to an adult confederate. Twenty-four non-mothers addressed an imaginary toddler and an imaginary adult. We found that only mothers increased pitch and produced the CD-typical pitch excursions when addressing their children. In contrast, non-mothers, but not mothers, used prosodic disambiguation in CD speech, which was corroborated by a forced choice test in which 48 listeners judged the intended meaning of each sentence. The results suggest that if speakers express genuine positive affect, they tend to emphasise affective prosody at the expense of linguistic prosody. In the case of CD speech, this communication strategy may be more effective as it serves to elicit the child's attention. | |
| dc.description.eprintid | 49 | |
| dc.description.faculty | casl | |
| dc.description.ispublished | pub | |
| dc.description.referencetext | [1] Baum, S., Pell, M. 1999. The neural bases of prosody:Insights from lesion studies and neuroimaging. Aphasiology, 13(8), 581-608. [2] Boersma, P., Weenink, D. 2005. Praat: Doing Phonetics by Computer (Version 4.3.04) [Computer Program]. [3] Fernald, A. 1994. Human maternal vocalizations to infants as biologically relevant signals: An evolutionary perspective. In P. Bloom (Ed.), Language Acquisition: Core Readings. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [4] Fernald, A., Mazzie, C. 1991. Prosody and focus in speech to infants and adults. Inf. Behav. Dev., 27, 209- 221. [5] Kaplan, P., Bachorowski, J.-A., Zarlengo-Strouse, P. 1999. Child-directed speech produced by mothers with symptoms of depression fails to promote associative learning in 4-month-old infants. Child Dev., 70(3), 560- 570. [6] Kaplan, P., Bachorowski, J.-A., Smoski, M., Hudenko, W.J. 2002. Infants of depressed mothers, although competent learners, fail to learn in response to their own mothers' infant-directed speech. Psych. Sci., 13(3), 268- 271. [7] Kraljic, T., Brennan, S. 2005. Prosodic disambiguation of syntactic structure: For the speaker or for the addressee? Cog. Psych., 50, 194-231. [8] McRoberts, G., Studdert-Kennedy, M., Shankweiler, D. 1995. The role of fundamental frequency in signalling linguistic stress and affect: Evidence for a dissociation. Perception & Psychophysics, (2), 159-174. [9] Morgan, J., Demuth, C. 1996. Signal to Syntax: Bootstrapping from Speech to Grammar in Early Acquisition. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. [10] Nitschke, J., Nelson, E., Rusch, B., Fox, A., Oakes, T., Davidson, R. 2004. Orbitofrontal cortex tracks positive mood in mothers viewing pictures of their newborn infants. NeuroImage, 21, 583-592. [11] Singh, L., Morgan, J., Best, C. 2002. Infants' listening preferences: Baby talk or happy talk? Infancy 3, 365-394. [12] Snedeker, J., Trueswell, J. 2003. Using prosody to avoid ambiguity: Effects of speaker awareness and referential context. J. Mem. Lang., 48, 103-130. [13] Thiessen, E. D., Hill, E. A., Saffran, J. R. 2005. Infantdirected speech facilitates word segmentation. Infancy, 7(1), 53-71. [14] Wong, P. 2002. Hemispheric specialization of linguistic pitch patterns. Brain Res. Bul., 59(2), 83-95. [15] Ziegler, W. 2003. Speech motor control is task-specific: Evidence from dysarthria and apraxia of speech. Aphasiology, 17(1), 3-36. | |
| dc.description.status | pub | |
| dc.format.extent | 2109-2112 | |
| dc.identifier | ER49 | |
| dc.identifier.citation | Schaeffler, S. & Kempe, V. (2007) Mothers are less efficient in employing prosodic disambiguation in child-directed speech than non-mothers : is there a trade-off between affective and linguistic prosody?, Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of the ICPhS, pp. 2109-2112. | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://www.icphs2007.de/ | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/handle/20.500.12289/49 | |
| dc.relation.ispartof | Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of the ICPhS | |
| dc.title | Mothers are less efficient in employing prosodic disambiguation in child-directed speech than non-mothers : is there a trade-off between affective and linguistic prosody? | |
| dc.type | article | |
| dcterms.accessRights | public | |
| qmu.author | Schaeffler, Sonja | |
| qmu.centre | CASL | en |
| rioxxterms.type | article |
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