the APriL project

APriL II: A cross-linguistic study of intonational development in young infants and children

Using the APriL corpus that was originally collected for the rhythm studies, we investigate the child acquisition of intonation cross-linguistically, and how this relates to patterns of linguistic maturation – in particular in segmental phonology and phonetic implementation. The cross-linguistic comparison allows us to assess the interaction of linguistic complexity and intonational development. More specifically, we investigate (1) whether there are different rates of acquisition for certain intonational features cross-linguistically (e.g. realisation of accents, inventory of contours used and cues to prosodic phrasing); (2) to what extent any interactions between intonation and other components of the language system are reflected in language-specificity in intonational development (with a focus on segmental structure, here); and (3) whether there are any identifiable distinct intonational characteristics in the Child Directed Speech which could potentially influence child acquisition.

The first study we carried out as part of this project analyzes the distribution, scaling and alignment of low and high targets in the productions of the 12 English, 12 Catalan, and 12 Spanish children in the APriL corpus, (aged of 2, 4 and 6). We compared the intonational patterns of words controlled for number of syllables and stress position in the children’s speech to the adult target provided by their mothers, both elicited with a controlled naming task. A total of 624 utterances were analyzed following the Autosegmental-Metrical framework. The results show that children as young as two can control relevant intonation parameters such as pitch height and pitch timing, although they still do not control syllabic duration and they still lengthen excessively final syllables. Even the youngest children show adult-like alignment of the low target, but their mastery of the high target increases with age. The prosodic typology of the ambient language influences the acquisition of tonal targets; young Spanish children show a more precise alignment of pitch scaling and of the alignment of the high targets than Catalan and English children.

This project is funded by the British Academy (Ref. SG-51777, March 2009 – February 2010)

APriL III: The acquisition of intonational grammar in Catalan, English, and Spanish

The main goal of this project is to analyze the development of early intonation f0 patterns in Catalan, English, and Spanish. Specifically, we address the following questions: (1) When do Catalan, English and Spanish children acquire the basic intonation patterns and the inventory of nuclear pitch accent configurations of the target langauge?; (2) Do the children master the alignment and scaling properties of pitch accents and boundary tones in the language from the beginning?; (3) How is the knowledge of intonational grammar paced with grammatical and lexical development? The empirical basis for this investigation will be three extensive longitudinal audiovisual corpora available in CHILDES: a) for Catalan, we will analyze the Serra-Solé corpus, consisting of the transcribed speech of four Catalan children; b) for Peninsular Spanish, the Llinàs-Ojea corpus and the López-Ornat corpus; c) for English, the Providence corpus for American English and the Forrester corpus for Bri
tish English. Pitch contours will be prosodically analyzed within the Autosegmental Metrical framework in all meaningful utterances produced by each child, and pragmatic meaning and communicative function will be assessed independently from the video files.

This project is funded by the Generalitat de Catalunya (Ref. 2009 PBR 00018; August 2009 – July 2010)