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Children's identification of questions from rising terminal pitch

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2015

MATHIEU R. SAINDON ,
SANDRA E. TREHUB ,
E. GLENN SCHELLENBERG  and
PASCAL VAN LIESHOUT
MATHIEU R. SAINDON
Affiliation:
University of Toronto, Canada
SANDRA E. TREHUB*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto, Canada
E. GLENN SCHELLENBERG
Affiliation:
University of Toronto, Canada
PASCAL VAN LIESHOUT
Affiliation:
University of Toronto, Canada
*
[*]Address for correspondence:University of Toronto – Psychology, 3359 Mississauga Rd, N Mississauga, Ontario L5L 1C6, Canada. e-mail: sandra.trehub@utoronto.ca
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Abstract

Young children are slow to master conventional intonation patterns in their yes/no questions, which may stem from imperfect understanding of the links between terminal pitch contours and pragmatic intentions. In Experiment 1, five- to ten-year-old children and adults were required to judge utterances as questions or statements on the basis of intonation alone. Children eight years of age or younger performed above chance levels but less accurately than adult listeners. To ascertain whether the verbal content of utterances interfered with young children's attention to the relevant acoustic cues, low-pass filtered versions of the same utterances were presented to children and adults in Experiment 2. Low-pass filtering reduced performance comparably for all age groups, perhaps because such filtering reduced the salience of critical pitch cues. Young children's difficulty in differentiating declarative questions from statements is not attributable to basic perceptual difficulties but rather to absent or unstable intonation categories.

Type
Brief Research Report
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 43 , Issue 5 , September 2016 , pp. 1174 - 1191
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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