Multilevel prosodic processing in a crosslinguistic perspective
Final Report Abstract
Research on early language acquisition has shown that prosodic information is one of the earliest cues infants use to bootstrap into the acquisition of lexical and syntactic properties of the target language and that infants acquire language specific prosodic properties within the first months of life. Still, less is known regarding how general auditory mechanisms contribute to and are shaped by infants developing phonological system. Based on results from previous common work, the present project approached this issue taking a crosslinguistic view on French and German learning children, two languages that have crucial differences in their prosodic systems of word stress and prosodic phrasing. First, French and German infants exploitation of acoustic factors that are implicated in the segmentation of speech (duration, intensity, pitch) were tested. Second, infants’ and adults’ sensitivity to prosodic cues that mark prosodic boundaries at the phrase level were explored, given evidence that these cues are used differently at the two levels in French and German. In parallel, based on the results on monolinguals showing different patterns of stress processing in these two languages, the development of the prosodic system in French-German bilinguals was studied. The use of the same experimental procedures and the same materials by the German and the French partners ensured a high degree of comparability of the results and allowed for reliable insights into differences and similarities of early monolingual and bilingual acquisition of these two languages. The crosslinguistic research conducted in this project revealed three main findings: The study on French and German 7-month old infants‘ use of duration, pitch and intensity for segmenting continuous speech showed that infants at this age use pitch and duration for segmentation and that there were no crosslinguistic differences between the German and French infants. This result is interesting since studies with adults showed crosslinguistic differences in segmentation based on these cues depending on the prosodic system of the native language. Our findings with infants support the assumption that the Iambic-Trochaic law is a candidate for a universal bias that infants may exploit in their earliest steps into language. The comparison of German monolingual infants with German-French bilingual infants on their development of the so-called trochaic bias (i.e., a listening prefence to the dominant foot structure that emerges in German monolingual infants by the age of 6 months) follow the same developmental trajectory. This suggests that the development of the trochaic bias is a rather robust phenomenon that is not crucially affected by the amount of exposure to the language that supports this bias. The research on French and German listeners‘ prosodic boundary perception provides the first clear evidence that prosodic boundary perception – like other areas of phonological perception – undergo a phase of perceptual reorganization in which the language specific instantiation of these boundaries have an impact on infants‘ sensitivity for them. This finding also opens further research questions – especially how crosslinguistic differences may affect the development of bilingual infants in this area.
Publications
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(2016). Early prosodic acquisition in bilingual infants: the case of the perceptual trochaic bias. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 210
Bijeljac-Babic, R., Höhle, B., & Nazzi, T.
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(2016). Rhythmic grouping according to the Iambic-Trochaic Law in French- and German-Learning infants. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 10, 292
Abboub, N., Boll-Avetisyan, N., Bhatara, A., Höhle, B. & Nazzi, T.
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(2016, May), How does prosodic boundary processing develop? Evidence from French-learning infants. International Conference on Infant Studies, New Orleans, USA
Larraza, S., van Ommen, S., Abboub, N., Boll-Avetisyan, N., Wellmann, C., Bijeljac-Babic, R., Höhle, B., Nazzi, T.
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(2017, June), Language-Specific sensitivity to prosodic boundaries - evidence from French- and German-learning infants. Workshop on Infant Language Development, Bilbao, Spain
van Ommen, S., Boll-Avetisyan, N., Larraza, S., Wellmann, C., Bijeljac-Babic, R., Höhle, B., Nazzi, T.
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(2018). Early sensitivity and acquisition of prosodic patterns at the lexical level. In P. Prieto Pilar and N. Esteve Gibert (Eds.), Prosodic Development in First Language Acquisition (pp. 37-57). John Benjamins
Bhatara, A., Boll-Avetisyan, N., Höhle, B., & Nazzi, T.
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(2019) Variability and stability in early language acquisition: Comparing monolingual and bilingual infants’ speech perception and word recognition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 23, 56-71
Höhle, B., Bijeljac-Babic, R., & Nazzi, T.
