Chapter published in:
The Development of Prosody in First Language Acquisition
Edited by Pilar Prieto and Núria Esteve-Gibert
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 23] 2018
► pp. 145–164

Early development of intonation

Perception and production

| Universidade de Lisboa
| Universidade de Lisboa
This chapter focuses on early development of intonation. Together with a precocious sensitivity to prosody documented in the literature, recent research has shown that infants’ early perception of pitch-based categories is already language-specific by 4–5 months, and that their discrimination abilities differ not only according to ambient language but also as a function of pitch properties (e.g., pitch direction, or pitch alignment). On the production side, and focusing on studies within the Autosegmental-Metrical framework, findings suggest that key landmarks in intonational development precede and constrain the acquisition of other aspects of grammar (e.g., word and phrase size, and combinatorial speech). Both from a perception and production point of view, language specific effects emerge very early on in development, underlying cross-linguistic differences.
Published online: 24 May 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.23.08fro
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