Acquisition of Prosodic Control in Typically Developing Children

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Spoken communication is more than merely producing and perceiving words in a sentence frame; how the utterance is produced (i.e. prosody) can dramatically alter the intended message. Adult linguistic prosody has a wide variety of accent and phrasing contrasts, yet our knowledge of the developmental trajectory of prosodic control remains incomplete. The overarching goal of the proposed work is to uncover children's emerging knowledge of the grammar of spoken prosody (i.e. what its contrastive categories are, how children signal them in production and recognize them in perception, and which communicative contexts they use them in), and to shed light on how this knowledge emerges into mastery of the adult inventory. A major limitation of previous work is the reliance on imitation and production tasks that may be confounded by the child's under-developed vocal motor system. In this proposal, we focus on developing an innovative methodology and stimuli for assessing prosodic control in a cross-sectional study of 30 children from three age groups 4, 7 and 11 years old. This project is aimed at developing and validating the Prosodic Marionette, a novel experimental tool that enables tracking of the child's ability to use prosodic knowledge despite potentially immature motor control of the vocal apparatus (Specific Aim 1); assessing children's knowledge of a broader range of prosodic contrasts and difficulty levels than previously studied (Specific Aim 2), and directly comparing prosodic abilities of children across age groups in both imitation and Prosodic Marionette tasks (Specific Aim 3). In addition to providing benchmarks for typical prosodic development, the proposed work has broader implications for understanding and remediating impairments of prosody, which have adverse consequences for linguistic, cognitive and social development. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: The overarching goal of the proposed work is to uncover children's emerging knowledge of the grammar of spoken prosody and to shed light on how this knowledge emerges into mastery of the adult inventory. In this proposal, we focus on developing a novel methodology and stimuli for assessing prosodic control in a cross-sectional study of 30 children from three age groups 4, 7 and 11 years old.