Finding Phrases: The Interplay of Word Frequency, Phrasal Prosody and Co-speech Visual Information in Chunking Speech by Monolingual and Bilingual Adults.
Irene de la Cruz-Pavía, Janet F Werker, Eric Vatikiotis-Bateson and 1 others
PMID 31002280WHAT IT FOUND
Head nods helped adults parse artificial speech only when they matched familiar spoken rhythm.
Alone, nods did not help. Bilingual adults followed the testing context more than unfamiliar rhythm.
Key findings
01Head nods helped bilingual adults only when aligned with familiar English-style prosody; they did not help when prosody was absent or unfamiliar.
02Bilingual adults preferred the frequent-initial pattern more than English monolingual adults.
03With unfamiliar pitch-based prosody, monolingual adults preferred the frequent-final pattern, while bilingual adults preferred the frequent-initial pattern.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study used artificial languages and a simple animated face, not natural speech or patient populations. All participants were tested in English, which may have biased bilingual segmentation toward English. The bilingual group included many different OV languages, so the findings cannot be tied to one language pair. Familiarization length differed between auditory-only and audiovisual conditions, which could affect comparisons. The paper does not report random allocation or dropouts.
Declared interests
The funding statement lists Marie Curie, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, French ANR, and ERC support.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that head nods are a general clinical cue for phrase boundaries. They helped only in specific artificial-language conditions and did not help when auditory prosody was absent.