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The Use of Pitch Accent in Word–Object Association by Monolingual Japanese Infants
Author(s) -
Mugitani Ryoko,
Kobayashi Tessei,
Hayashi Akiko,
Fais Laurel
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.12279
Subject(s) - psychology , pitch accent , nonsense , association (psychology) , contrast (vision) , stress (linguistics) , context (archaeology) , object (grammar) , task (project management) , word (group theory) , word learning , word association , communication , linguistics , audiology , speech recognition , artificial intelligence , prosody , computer science , vocabulary , history , medicine , biochemistry , chemistry , philosophy , management , archaeology , psychoanalysis , psychotherapist , economics , gene
This study investigated the lexical use of Japanese pitch accent in Japanese‐learning infants. A word–object association task revealed that 18‐month‐old infants succeeded in learning the associations between two nonsense objects paired with two nonsense words minimally distinguished by pitch pattern (Experiment 1). In contrast, 14‐month‐old infants failed (Experiment 2). Eighteen‐month‐old infants succeeded even for sounds that contained only the prosodic information (Experiment 3). However, a subsequent experiment revealed that 14‐month‐old infants succeeded in an easier single word–object task using pitch contrast (Experiment 4). These findings indicate that pitch pattern information is robustly available to 18‐month‐old Japanese monolingual infants in a minimal pair word‐learning situation, but only partially accessible in the same context for 14‐month‐old infants.