Age, babble noise, and working memory have been found to affect the recognition of emotional prosody based on non-tonal languages, yet little is known about how exactly they influence tone-language-speaking children's recognition of emotional prosody. In virtue of the tectonic theory of Stroop effects and the Ease of Language Understanding (ELU)…

Contrastive focus, conveyed by prosodic cues, marks important information. Studies have shown that 6-year-olds learning English and Japanese can use contrastive focus during online sentence comprehension: focus used in a "contrastive context" facilitates the identification of a target referent (speeding up processing), whereas focus used…

Infants must develop both flexibility and constraint in their interpretation of acceptable word forms. The current experiments examined the development of infants' lexical interpretation of non-native variations in pitch contour. Fourteen-, 17-, and 19-month-olds (Experiments 1 and 2, N = 72) heard labels for two novel objects; labels…