How Do Infants Disaggregate Referential and Affective Pitch?

Abstract

Infants are faced with a challenge of disaggregating functions of pitch in the ambient language into affective, pragmatic or referential (the latter in tone languages only). This mini review discusses several factors that might facilitate the disaggregation of referential and affective pitch in infancy: acoustic characteristics of infant-directed speech, recognition of vocal affect, facial cues accompanying affective prosody, and lateralization of affective and referential prosody in the brain. It proposes two hypotheses concerning the role of audiovisual cues and brain lateralization

The Diversity of Tone Languages and the Roles of Pitch Variation in Non-tone Languages: Considerations for Tone Perception Research

“…However, more recent studies have extended the investigation to word recognition and learning (Singh and Foong, 2012; Singh et al, 2014; Hay et al, 2015), including a number of papers in this Special Topic volume (e.g., Liu and Kager, 2018; Ota et al, 2018; Burnham et al, 2019; and several other papers discussed below). Other recent advances include studies on the developmental relationship between perception of lexical tones and perception of higher-tier linguistic information such as stress and prosody (Quam and Swingley, 2010; Liu and Kager, 2014; Singh and Chee, 2016; Choi et al, 2017; Ma et al, 2017) and paralinguistic features such as pitch variations that convey emotions (e.g., Kager, 2018).…”

The development of tone discrimination in infancy: Evidence from a cross‐linguistic, multi‐lab report

“…The types of pitch movements that drive changes in lexical tone often overlap with intonational categories (Braun & Johnson, 2011; Wang et al., 2022; Wang et al., 2021). It is possible that the disaggregation of pitch into lexical and non‐lexical function is inherently more complex than the differentiation of consonants and vowels as native or non‐native (see Kager, 2018 for a discussion of this issue). Due to increased complexity, learners may retain tone sensitivity in the service of disaggregating pitch into its constituent functions.…”

“…Third, tone is linguistically interesting as it is carried by a dimension of speech – vocal pitch – that varies in communicatively significant ways in all languages, yet it is only lexicalised in tone languages. The differentiation of pitch into its various functions is a challenge for every learner but is arguably a particularly interesting challenge for tone language learners who must isolate lexical tone from other sources of pitch variation such as intonation (see Kager, 2018). Finally, there is emerging evidence that tone language learners differ from non‐tone language learners not only in their perception of lexical pitch but also in their sensitivity to vowels and consonants (Chen et al., 2021; Gómez et al., 2018; Poltrock et al., 2018; Wewalaarachchi et al., 2017; Wiener & Turnbull, 2016).…”