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Prosody in First Language Acquisition – Acquiring Intonation as a Tool to Organize Information in Conversation
Author(s) -
Speer Shari R.,
Ito Kiwako
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
language and linguistics compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.619
H-Index - 44
ISSN - 1749-818X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1749-818x.2008.00103.x
Subject(s) - prosody , intonation (linguistics) , conversation , linguistics , comprehension , focus (optics) , psychology , computer science , spoken language , communication , natural language processing , philosophy , physics , optics
Recent research on children's acquisition of prosody, or the rhythm and melody in language, demonstrates that young children use prosody in their comprehension and production of utterances to a greater extent than was previously documented. Spoken language, structured by prosodic form, is the primary input on which the mental representations and processes that comprise language use are built. Understanding how children acquire prosody and develop the mapping between prosody and other aspects of language is crucial to any effort to model the role of prosody in the processing system. We focus on two aspects of prosody that have been shown to play a primary role in its use as an organizational device in human languages, prosodic phrasal grouping, and intonational prominence.