Acquisition of Prosodic Control in Typically Developing Children

描述（由申请人提供）：口语交流不仅仅是在句子框架中产生和感知单词；说话的方式（即韵律）可以极大地改变想要传达的信息。成人语言韵律有各种各样的口音和短语对比，但我们对韵律控制的发展轨迹的认识仍然不完整。提出的工作的总体目标是揭示儿童对口语韵律语法的新兴知识（即，它的对比类别是什么，儿童如何在生产中发出信号并在感知中识别它们，以及他们在哪些交际环境中使用它们），并阐明这些知识如何成为成人清单的掌握。先前工作的一个主要限制是依赖于模仿和生产任务，这可能会被儿童不发达的声音运动系统所混淆。在本研究中，我们对来自4岁、7岁和11岁三个年龄组的30名儿童进行了横断面研究，重点开发了一种创新的方法和刺激来评估韵律控制。该项目旨在开发和验证韵律木偶，这是一种新颖的实验工具，可以跟踪儿童使用韵律知识的能力，尽管他们可能对发声器官的运动控制不成熟（具体目标1）；评估儿童对更广泛的韵律对比和难度水平的认识（具体目标2），并直接比较不同年龄组儿童在模仿和韵律木偶任务中的韵律能力（具体目标3）。除了为典型的韵律发展提供基准外，所提出的工作对理解和纠正韵律障碍具有更广泛的意义，这些障碍对语言，认知和社会发展具有不利影响。

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.