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Intonation Plays a Role in Language Discrimination by Infants
Author(s) -
Chong Adam J.,
Vicenik Chad,
Sundara Megha
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
infancy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.361
H-Index - 69
eISSN - 1532-7078
pISSN - 1525-0008
DOI - 10.1111/infa.12257
Subject(s) - intonation (linguistics) , prosody , german , psychology , variation (astronomy) , linguistics , american english , language acquisition , language development , developmental psychology , philosophy , physics , mathematics education , astrophysics
Previous research on infant language discrimination has focused primarily on the role of prosody, specifically rhythmic timing cues. This, however, ignores the potentially useful role that intonation, another aspect of prosody, might play in aiding discrimination. In this article, we investigated how and when American English‐learning infants discriminate between prosodically similar languages, specifically American English and German, focusing on the role of intonation in infant language discrimination. We found that the ability to distinguish American English and German develops between 5 and 7 months. However, 7‐month‐olds failed to discriminate the two languages when the natural pitch variation was replaced by a monotone. Thus, intonation is necessary for infants’ discrimination of American English and German. Based on these results, we argue for a greater role of intonation in supporting language discrimination by infants.