Prosodic development in European Portuguese from childhood to adulthood

Abstract

We describe the European Portuguese (EP) version of a test of prosodic abilities originally developed for English -the Profiling Elements of Prosody in Speech-Communication (PEPS-C; Peppé & McCann, 2003). Using this test, we examined the development of several components of EP prosody between 5 and 20 years of age (N = 131). Results showed prosodic performance improving with age: 5-year-olds reach adult-like performance in the affective prosodic tasks; 7-year-olds mastered the ability to discriminate and produce short prosodic items, as well as the ability to understand question versus declarative intonation; 8-year-olds mastered the ability to discriminate long prosodic items; 9-year-olds mastered the ability to produce question versus declarative intonation, as well as the ability to identify focus; 10/11-year-olds mastered the ability to produce long prosodic items; 14/15-year-olds mastered the ability to comprehend and produce syntactically ambiguous utterances disambiguated by prosody; and 18/20-year-olds mastered the ability to produce focus. Crosslinguistic comparisons showed that linguistic form-meaning relations do not necessarily develop at the same pace across languages. Some prosodic contrasts are hard to achieve for younger Portuguese-speaking children, namely the production of Chunking and Focus.Keywords: prosody, assessment, prosodic development, European Portuguese 4 PROSODIC DEVELOPMENT IN EUROPEAN PORTUGUESE Prosodic development in European Portuguese from childhood to adulthood Prosody plays an important part in the production and comprehension of the organization of speech, manifested by patterns of intonation, rhythm, prominence, and chunking of the speech continuum. Several form-meaning relations are established or contributed to by prosody, namely sentence type distinctions, the highlighting of important information, the demarcation of speech units (also known as phrasing), and different kinds of affective meanings (Halliday, 1967; Ladd, 2008). Many prosodic form-meaning relations convey linguistic meanings, that is meanings related to the message, such as interrogativity, finality, or focus, which may (or not) be grammaticalized in different languages and in different ways (Gussenhoven, 2002(Gussenhoven, , 2016. For example, interrogativity tends to be signalled by high or rising pitch, and finality by low pitch (as in English or Portuguese), but in Swedish a final low tone is used both in statements and questions; focus in West Germanic languages is typically achieved by the presence of a pitch contour in the prominent element (accentuation) and absence of accentuation on words that follow the prominent element, whereas other languages may use different types of accents to contrast focused and unfocused words (such as Portuguese; Frota, 2014). Other prosodic form-meaning relations express meanings related to the state of the speaker, such as the affective meanings of (un)happy or (un)cooperative, which tend to be less arbitrary and thus less language-specific (Gussenhoven, 2016)...

Prosody perception and production by children with cochlear implants

“…These learnability results mirror those regarding hypothesis group A, where learnability was speculated to be partial for the experimental but not observed in the control group. However, the results are out of sync with earlier research reporting age effects until around twelve years of age (e.g., Aguert et al, 2013;Filipe et al, 2017). This might be because, whereas the CI children in our study might still be in the process of learning, given that some of their core outcomes did correlate with a subset of developmental measures, for NH children the tasks may not have been cognitively challenging enough to show age differences, in dissonance with some earlier reports (Ito et al, 2014;Wells et al, 2004); indeed, NH children scored better on the Non-word repetition test than the CI children.…”

“…Children use prosody to infer, or (in production) show, emotional states as early as the first year of life (Flom & Bahrick, 2007;Scheiner, Hammerschmidt, Jürgens, & Zwirner, 2006), but the development of their mastery in some studies extends well into primary school (Aguert, Laval, Lacroix, Gil, & Le Bigot, 2013;Peppé, McCann, Gibbon, O'Hare, & Rutherford, 2007). For certain forms of linguistic prosody, this acquisition seems to develop over a longer time, although with differentiation between languages and prosody types (Chen, 2007;de Ruiter, 2010;Filipe, Peppé, Frota, & Vicente, 2017;Ito, Bibyk, Wagner, & Speer, 2014). Linguistic intonation acquisition has been found to correlate with more general measures of linguistic development (Wells, Peppe, & Goulandris, 2004).…”

An Ultrasound Study of the Development of Lingual Coarticulation during Childhood

“…For example, in this study the target CV syllable words were in a prominent position in the carrier phrase; the age-related pattern of results on Beckman et al, 1992). Designing future experiments to include varying prosodic conditions for the target word would make it possible to investigate how segmental articulatory constraints may differentially affect coarticulation across age groups and prosodic conditions, given that prosodic abilities continually develop throughout childhood and adolescence (Filipe et al, 2017).…”

Executive Functions and Prosodic Abilities in Children With High-Functioning Autism

“… Bishop et al (2014) suggest that delayed development of frontal lobes may impact on brain regions that are important for EFs and language processing. Both EF and prosodic abilities emerge early in development, but continue to develop until later ages, with adult-level performance on many tests of EF and prosodic skills being reached at puberty, and performance on many measures continuing to change into adulthood (e.g., Anderson, 2002 ; Peppé and McCann, 2003 ; Wells et al, 2004 ; Best et al, 2009 ; Filipe et al, 2017 ). Therefore, the comorbidity between difficulties in EF and prosodic impairments could be a consequence of shared genetic mechanisms.…”

“…Participants were evaluated with the European Portuguese version of the Profiling Elements of Prosody in Speech-Communication (PEPS-C; original version: Peppé and McCann, 2003 ; Portuguese version: Filipe et al, 2017 ). This test assesses prosodic skills through twelve subtests: six of the subtests address receptive abilities and the other six address expressive abilities.…”