Is Prosodic Development Correlated with Grammatical and Lexical Development? Evidence from Emerging Intonation in Catalan and Spanish

• Published in: Journal of child language Vol. 39; no. 2; pp. 221 - 257
• Main Authors: Prieto, Pilar, Estrella, Ana, Thorson, Jill, Vanrell, Maria del Mar
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England Cambridge University Press 01-03-2012
• Subjects: Biology; Child Language; Child, Preschool; Children; Correlation; Grammar; Humans; Infant; Intonation; Language Acquisition; Language Development; Linguistic Theory; Phonetics; Pragmatics; Romance Languages; Semantics; Spain; Spanish Speaking; Speech Communication; Vocabulary Development; Voice; Spain
• ISSN: 0305-0009; 1469-7602
• DOI: 10.1017/S030500091100002X

This investigation focuses on the development of intonation patterns in four Catalan-speaking children and two Spanish-speaking children between 0 ; 11 and 2 ; 4. Pitch contours were prosodically analyzed within the Autosegmental Metrical framework in all meaningful utterances, for a total of 6558 utterances. The pragmatic meaning and communicative function were also assessed. Three main conclusions arise from the results. First, the study shows that the Autosegmental Metrical model can be successfully used to transcribe early intonation contours. Second, results reveal that children's emerging intonation is largely independent of grammatical development, and generally it develops well before the appearance of two-word combinations. As for the relationship between lexical and intonational development, the data show that the emergence of intonational grammar is related to the onset of speech and the presence of a small lexicon. Finally, we discuss the implications of these results for the biological hypothesis of intonational production. (Contains 1 footnote.)