Effects of contrastive accents on children’s discourse comprehension

Abstract

What role do contrastive accents play in children's discourse comprehension? By 6 years of age, children use contrastive accents during online comprehension to predict upcoming referents (Ito et al., 2014;Sekerina & Trueswell, 2012). But, at this age, children's performance on offline tasks of accent comprehension is poor (e.g., Wells et al., 2004). To examine whether the asymmetry could reflect a developmental stage in which the processing system uses contrastive accents to make local predictions, but fails to incorporate this information into discourse representations, we tested the effect of contrastive accents on children's memory of the content of a discourse. Five-year-olds heard 12 different stories consecutively, one after another, and the critical words were manipulated so that they were produced either with a contrastive L+H* accent or with a presentational H* accent. We found that children remembered facts about the contrast set better when the target word had an appropriate contrastive accent earlier than when it had a presentational accent. The results show that by 5 years, children are able to use contrastive accents for encoding a discourse, as well as for making local predictions during online comprehension.

Prosody perception and production by children with cochlear implants

“…Personality factors, for instance, might have played a role in the experimental group as well, for instance representing a wider variation than for the NH group. The lack of understanding by participants of the focus perception task was not due to a fundamental lack of focus comprehension, as this has been shown to be present to some extent, although with difficulty relative to adults, at this age in previous research (Lee & Snedeker, 2016;Sekerina & Trueswell, 2012). It cannot be ascertained at present if CI children had even more difficulty than NH children, but most likely the task itself was not appropriate.…”

Eye see what you're saying: Contrastive use of beat gesture and pitch accent affects online interpretation of spoken discourse.

“…Broad evidence suggests that, in language comprehension, contrastive pitch accenting directs listeners' attention to a contrast between the current referent and a previously mentioned referent, whereas presentational pitch accenting directs listeners' attention to new referents more generally (for a review, see Gotzner & Spalek, 2019). For instance, offline memory for referents with contrastive accenting is superior to memory for referents with presentational accenting, particularly when a salient contrasting referent must be rejected (Fraundorf et al, 2010(Fraundorf et al, , 2012Lee & Snedeker, 2016;Sanford et al, 2006). Moreover, in online language comprehension, contrastive pitch accenting facilitates rejection of objects contrasting with a spoken referent (e.g., [satellite] dish, which is an alternative to antenna; Braun & Tagliapietra, 2010;Husband & Ferreira, 2016).…”

“…Although contrast can be discerned semantically after the fact based on salient contradictions between entities (Gotzner & Spalek, 2019), it can also be anticipated based on potentially diagnostic features within the communicative environment, which we term cues (e.g., font, speech, gestural emphasis). Cues facilitate discourse comprehension and strengthen mental representations of propositional relations between contrasting entities insofar as they convey contrast reliably (Fraundorf et al, 2013; Fraundorf et al, 2010, 2012; Lee & Snedeker, 2016; Sanford et al, 2006). Thus, cues that consistently co-occur with contrastive information enhance its processing to a greater degree than cues that inconsistently occur with contrastive information (Grodner & Sedivy, 2011; Roettger & Franke, 2019; Roettger & Rimland, 2020; Ryskin et al, 2019).…”

How Children Process Reduced Forms: A Computational Cognitive Modeling Approach to Pronoun Processing in Discourse

“…Overt pronouns may refer to the discourse topic if they are stressed. However, it is unlikely that children's interpretations of overt pronouns were influenced by an incomplete acquisition of the distinction between stressed and unstressed pronouns, since children are able to use contrastive stress during online comprehension in discourse from the age of 5, at least in English (Lee & Snedeker, 2016). It is conceivable, however, that the repetition of the topical full NP influenced the overall coherence of the stories in the experiment and thus influenced the interpretation of overt pronouns, although no evidence of a so-called repeated name penalty (see Gordon, Grosz, & Gilliom, 1993) was found in adults (Vogelzang et al, 2016(Vogelzang et al, , 2020.…”