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.
A selection of mediaeval Romance lyrics complementing the two previous studies published in this issue of Terminus. It presents the first Polish translations of a number of works classified as traditional and courtly albas. The translations were made from five mediaeval Romance languages and Latin. The works whose authors are known are provided with a biographical note. Additionally, a historical and literary perspective for the presented collection is outlined. It also discusses some terms of fin’amor poetry that are difficult in translation. A comprehensive introduction gives information on the intentions of the authors of this collection, the translation technique developed here, and the specifics of translating Romance lyric into Polish. The three troubadour albas (Rimbaut de Vaqueiras, Cadenet, Uc de Bacalaria) examined here illustrate the translation strategies developed by Magdalena Pabisiak, presenting different variants of the translated text and criteria for making particular choices in the translation. Difficulties related to recreating the metric system of Romance lyric in a language with different prosody, syntactic structures, length of words, and vowel frequency are discussed, showing, inter alia, how difficult it is to obtain in Polish the same repeatability of rhymes so characteristic for this type of lyric.
JavaScript is turned off in your web browser. Turn it on to take full advantage of this site, then refresh the page.