In:
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Acoustical Society of America (ASA), Vol. 140, No. 4_Supplement ( 2016-10-01), p. 3448-3448
Abstract:
Like consonants and vowels, infants’ ability to discriminate lexical pitch becomes language-specific with age (Mattock & Burnham, 2006). We know less about when infants perceive pitch marking of prosodic units. We tested English-learning infants on Portuguese bisyllabic stimuli where statements and yes/no questions are segmentally identical but distinguished by a fall versus a rise on the final syllable. Using the visual habituation paradigm, we found that unlike Portuguese infants (Frota et al., 2014), only English 8-, but not 4-month-olds are able to distinguish final rise from fall in the presence of segmental variability. Besides having a rising pitch, the final syllable in Portuguese questions is also longer. We are currently testing English 8-month-olds with resynthesized Portuguese stimuli that maintain the pitch difference, but neutralize duration. Together, the results will help us reconcile the previously reported failure of English-learning infants to distinguish English statements from questions (Soderstrom et al., 2011; Geffen, 2014), with their precocious sensitivity to prosody (Jusczyk, 1997).
Type of Medium:
Online Resource
ISSN:
0001-4966
,
1520-8524
Language:
English
Publisher:
Acoustical Society of America (ASA)
Publication Date:
2016
detail.hit.zdb_id:
1461063-2
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