Prosodic realizations of new, given, and corrective referents in the spontaneous speech of toddlers.
Jill C Thorson, James L Morgan
PMID 34726145WHAT IT FOUND
Toddlers at 2;6 use pitch patterns like adults to mark new, given, and corrective information, but favor high-pitched accents too broadly.
Duration was the only acoustic cue distinguishing information types, suggesting pitch control develops later than timing.
Key findings
01Toddlers and adults both use duration to distinguish new from given information, but only duration significantly differentiated these categories acoustically.
02Toddlers show a strong preference for the H* pitch accent across all information statuses, unlike adults who vary accents more, indicating immature prosodic control.
03Both toddlers and adults frequently accent 'given' information, contradicting the idea that given information must always be deaccented in natural speech.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Small sample size (12 toddlers, 6 adults). Spontaneous speech task resulted in unequal numbers of tokens for each category, particularly fewer CORRECTIVE examples. Acoustic analysis was restricted to utterance-final words to control for phrase-final lengthening, which may limit generalizability to mid-sentence prosody. The study is cross-sectional, so it cannot track individual developmental trajectories.
Declared interests
None declared in the provided text.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that toddlers cannot mark information status. They do, but they rely more heavily on duration and less on pitch variation than adults. Interpreting their broad use of high-pitched accents as a lack of pragmatic understanding is incorrect.