The objective of this study was to examine the links between prosodic features of paternal Infant-Directed Speech (IDS) and child characteristics. Pitch variability measures were extracted from the speech samples of 50 fathers during unstructured play with their two-year-old children. Evidence for a link between child receptive language ability…

Purpose: This study used a cross-sequential design to identify developmental changes in narrative speech rhythm and intonation. The aim was to provide a robust, clinically relevant characterization of normative changes in speech prosody across the early school-age years. Method: Structured spontaneous narratives were elicited annually from 60…

Prosody (prominence, rhythm, intonation, etc.) is crucial for using language efficiently and conveying one's intended meaning at different linguistic levels. Therefore, a child has to acquire the prosodic system of the language in order to become a competent speaker of that language. Even though the importance of prosody is well known, we still do…

Children achieve their first language milestones initially in gesture and prosody before they do so in speech. However, little is known about the potential precursor role of those features later in development when children start using more complex linguistic skills. In this study, we explore how children's ability to reflect on their degree of…

Using a novel emotional perspective-taking task, this study investigated 4-year-olds' (n = 97) use of a speaker's emotional prosody to make inferences about the speaker's emotional state and, correspondingly, their communicative intent. Eye gaze measures indicated preschoolers used emotional perspective inferences to guide their real-time…

It remains controversial whether children are able to process and integrate specific linguistic cues in their mental model to the same extent as adults. In the present study, a sentence continuation task was employed to determine how Italian speakers (4-, 5-, 6-year-olds and adults) interpret prosodic cues to decide which referent is more salient…

This study examined falling tone and final syllable lengthening in the spontaneous speech of 10 4-year-old children with specific language impairment (SLI). The falling tone was observed in 9 of the 10 SLI children, despite deficits in segmental phonology, morphosyntax, and mean length of utterance, suggesting a possible dissociation between…

Acoustic analyses, along with perceptual ratings, measured the extent to which preschoolers imitated three modeled intonation contours (declarative, interrogative, and monotone). Results indicated that five-year-old children imitated modeled contours more frequently than did three-year-old children, with between-group differences largely because…