Non-segmental phonology in language acquisition: A review of the issues☆

Developmental theories of intonation are typically based on the idea that linguistic pitch patterns reflect biological or emotional “natural tendencies”. Accordingly, these theories predict that intonation will develop along with the infant's earliest speech-like vocalizations. This article examines the empirical and theoretical basis of the claim that children master intonation before the onset of speech. As a background for studying prosodic development, Section 2 describes three components of intonation: (1) intonation-groups, (2) forms of intonation, and (3) tonal meanings. Section 3 presents criteria for evaluating children's development in each of these areas. Section 4 focuses on studies of children's development of intonation from 3 to 25 months of age, with special attention to the grammatical, pragmatic, and affective/attitudinal functions of pitch patterns. Most studies were not designed to meet the criteria specified in Section 3. Although this makes any conclusions very tentative at present, our review suggests that children control some core features of intonation before they produce two-word combinations— but not before they produce their first words. Register seems to be the first component of intonation to stabilize in the single-word period. Except for pre-intentional associations between pitch level and affect, natural tendencies are not sufficient to account for children's development of intonation.

Although affective prosody appears to be a dominant function of the right hemisphere, its degre of lateralization has not yet been established since various publications have reported affective–prosodic deficits following left brain damage in association with aphasia. This paper explores the mechanisms underlying affective–prosodic deficits following left and right brain damage by testing the ability of subjects to repeat and comprehend affective prosody under progressively reduced verbal–articulatory conditions. The results demonstrate that reducing verbal–articulatory conditions robustly improves the performance of left but not right brain damaged patients, a finding that supports the supposition that affective prosody is strongly lateralized to the right hemisphere. However, the performance of left brain damaged patients was not correlated to the presence, severity, or type of aphasic deficit(s). Based on functional–anatomic correlations for spontaneous affective prosody and affective–prosodic repetition, deep white matter lesions located below the supplementary motor area that disrupt interhemispheric connections coursing through the mid-rostral corpus callosum may contribute to affective–prosodic deficits that are both additive and independent of any aphasic deficits. In light of these and other findings, various anatomical, functional, and maturational hierarchic relationships between the affective–prosodic and verbal–linguistic aspects of language are posited in order to help further explain discrepancies that exist in the literature regarding the neurology of affective prosody.

This chapter focuses on potential similarities between speech and music from the perspective of infant listeners. The stimuli of concern are sound sequences rather than single sounds, despite the predominant research focusing on the latter class of stimuli. The exclusion of single sounds can be justified on a number of grounds. First, several comprehensive reviews of infants' ability to perceive single speech and non-speech sounds are available. Second, evidence indicates that global patterns of speech are more salient in the pre-linguistic period than are individual speech segments. In the non-speech domain, evidence also indicates that infants proceed from global processing of auditory patterns to local processing of pattern details. In drawing parallels between speech and music, the chapter focuses on two principal issues: the input provided by caregivers for their infants and the processing of such input by infant listeners. Much of the work to be reported, particularly in the musical domain, is relatively recent. As a result, the exposition is tentative rather than definitive, its purpose being to suggest new avenues for future research and thinking.

In the present review, we outline a set of principles governing infants' deployment of attention to auditory events. Infants initially look in the direction of sounding objects, later reaching for the objects. They find some sound qualities highly salient, such as female voices in general and the mother's voice in particular. Infants selectively attend to the pitch contours and rhythms of animated speech and musical sequences. They encode finer details of some musical sequences, notably those typical of their culture. Moreover, simplicity or familiarity of the sequences and greater maturity of the infant lead to more comprehensive auditory processing. Finally, we identify a number of parallels between infants' processing of speech and music, and propose directions for future research.

Renewed interest in the teaching of stress and intonation has arisen through the functional approach to language teaching, with its wider use of conversational texts. Stress and intonation is a notoriously difficult area to teach and test, yet should probably be learned as early as possible in L2, as indeed it is in L1. Speakers of syllable-timed or tone languages will have particular difficulty with stress and intonation patterns in English. Examples are given of three useful tests in the area of stress/intonation, which seems to constitute a distinct factor in the language learning process.