Emotional and linguistic prosody development in Polish children: Three different paths

• Authors: Joanna Śmiecińska
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The development of prosodic competence in children is a complex process. Various, often conflicting developmental paths have been proposed in the literature, with both the general testing method and language specific factors seeming to be responsible for the variety of the outcomes. In the present study receptive prosodic skills of over 100 Polish children aged 3;6–11 were assessed and compared to the skills of young adults (20–30) in three tasks; emotion recognition of single word utterances, question vs. statement distinction, and synthetic vs. recorded human voice discrimination. No age effect was found in the emotion recognition task; the question vs. statement distinction ability had a clear developmental threshold at the age between 7 and 8, and the ability to spot rhythmic and temporal distortions of synthetic speech gradually improved with age, but was generally not developed in 3;6 to 5;6 year olds. The results suggest a complex path of acquisition of the above skills.

Keywords

EN

Prosody development; emotional prosody; linguistic prosody; synthetic speech recognition; Polish prosody

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Journal: Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics
• Year: 2016
• Volume: 52
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 519-554

Dates

published

2016-09-01

online

2016-10-10

Contributors

author

Joanna Śmiecińska

• Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań
• Faculty of English Adam Mickiewicz University Collegium Novum al. Niepodległości 4 61-874 Poznań

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/psicl-2016-0020