The Acquisition of Prosody: Evidence from French- and English-Learning Infants

Abstract

Prosody is generally described in terms of three main suprasegmental features that vary in language-specific ways: the fundamental frequency contours, which give a language its characteristic melody; the duration or timing measures, which give a language its characteristic rhythm; and the amplitude patterns, which give a language its characteristic patterns of loud versus soft syllables. When does the prosody of infants' utterances begin to show language-specific effects? To answer this question it is important first to understand the linguistic environment of the child, which is characterized by a special sociolinguistic register called child-directed speech (CDS). CDS has marked grammatical as well as prosodic characteristics, for which a number of possible uses have been suggested. It is also important to understand what is known about infants' sensitivity to the three prosodic features of speech. Since English and French provide very different prosodic models for young infants, they ~re thus excellent choices for investigating the Issue of language-specific prosodic influences on infan~s' utterances. Analyzing the reduplicative babblIng of two groups of infants, one learning French and the other English, Doug Whalen, Qi Wang and I have found evidence for the early acquisition of certain language-specific prosodic features. These results can be discussed in terms of a possible order of acquisition for languagespecific prosodic features and in terms of evidence for possible regression in children's apparent sensitivity to prosodic information.