Stress patterns of early child language

Wieman, Leslie A.

doi:10.1017/s0305000900001501

Cited by 61 publications

(47 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Studies such as those by Hornby and Hass (1970) and Wieman (1976) established that the ability to shift accent-placement for contrastive purposes in accordance with information structure predictions is well-developed in young neurotypical English-speaking children. Hornby and Hass (1970) asked participants to correct a series of incorrect picture descriptions that they heard: in 93% of cases the correction was marked by emphatic stress.…”

Section: Contrastive/sentential Accent Placement In Englishmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…Hornby and Hass (1970) asked participants to correct a series of incorrect picture descriptions that they heard: in 93% of cases the correction was marked by emphatic stress. Wieman (1976) found that when the two-word utterances of 2-year-old English-speaking children departed from canonical stress patterns, the deviations were attributable to the accenting of the word in the utterance that carried new information. Macwhinney and Bates (1978) used sequences of pictures to be described by the participants; each pictures in a sequence of three introduced a new element which was expected to be included in the description and accented.…”

Section: Contrastive/sentential Accent Placement In Englishmentioning

confidence: 98%

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Cross-linguistic expression of contrastive accent: Clinical assessment in Spanish and English

Martínez‐Castilla

Peppé

2010

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics

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Well-documented Romance-Germanic differences in the use of accent in speech to convey information-structure and focus cause problems for the assessment of prosodic skills in populations with clinical disorders. The strategies for assessing the ability to use lexical and contrastive accent in English and Spanish are reviewed, and studies in the expression of contrastive accent in Spanish- and English-speaking typically-developing children are described. These studies used similar tasks requiring pre-final contrastive accent. Results were, however, strikingly different (English > Spanish). Using the same tasks, studies of English-speaking individuals with autism and Williams syndrome showed marked difficulty with the expression of contrastive stress, but the use of such tasks with Spanish speakers may merely reflect cross-linguistic differences. This study presents the methodology and results of these tasks, and suggests alternative methods of assessing the ability to discern and use contrastive accents in Spanish.

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Section: Contrastive/sentential Accent Placement In Englishmentioning

confidence: 95%

Section: Contrastive/sentential Accent Placement In Englishmentioning

confidence: 98%

Cross-linguistic expression of contrastive accent: Clinical assessment in Spanish and English

Martínez‐Castilla

Peppé

2010

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics

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“…Wiemann (1976) observed in recordings made during natural play sessions with five 2-year-old English-speaking children that accent placement in the two-word stage was governed by the semantic relation between the two words. For example, in Verb-Locative utterances (e.g.…”

Section: Productionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is there really an asymmetry in the acquisition of the focus-to-accentuation mapping?

Chen

2010

Lingua

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“…There is no currently available data about children's use of accenting during reference comprehension. The only evidence of children's sensitivity to the relationship between accenting and discourse status comes from production studies, which show that English-speaking preschoolers produce adult-like accenting in their own speech, preferring accented tokens for new referents, and unaccented ones for given referents (Wieman, 1976;Hornby & Hass, 1970;MacWhinney & Bates, 1978). However, these findings do not mean that children can also use accenting during comprehension.…”

Section: Does Accenting Guide Preschoolers' Reference Interpretation?mentioning

confidence: 99%

THE BACON not the bacon: How children and adults understand accented and unaccented noun phrases

Arnold

2008

Cognition

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Two eye-tracking experiments examine whether adults and 4 and 5 year old children use the presence or absence of accenting to guide their interpretation of noun phrases (e.g., the bacon) with respect to the discourse context. Unaccented nouns tend to refer to contextually accessible referents, while accented variants tend to be used for less accessible entities. Experiment 1 confirms that accenting is informative for adults, who show a bias toward previously-mentioned objects beginning 300 msec after the onset of unaccented nouns and pronouns. But contrary to findings in the literature, accented words produced no observable bias. In Experiment 2, 4 and 5 year olds were also biased toward previously-mentioned objects with unaccented nouns and pronouns. This builds on findings of limits on children's on-line reference comprehension (Arnold, Brown-Schmidt, & Trueswell, in press), showing that children's interpretation of unaccented nouns and pronouns is constrained in contexts with one single highly accessible object.Learning to understand language involves more than just words and grammatical rules. Children must learn to interpret words and sentences by connecting them with the preceding discourse and the larger context -and to do so very rapidly, as each word and sentence comes at them. This study investigates young children's ability to generate on-line hypotheses about the referent of expressions like the bagel, with a focus on understanding whether children utilize the presence or absence of an accent to guide these hypotheses. Unaccented words tend to refer to information that is highly accessible in the discourse, while accented words tend to refer to less accessible information (e.g., Venditti & Hirschberg, 2003). Research has shown that adults are highly sensitive to this information, and use it rapidly to guide their interpretation of the nominal referring expression (Dahan, Tanenhaus, & Chambers, 2002). It is not known how accenting is used by children during reference comprehension. Furthermore, what is known about reference comprehension in children presents conflicting information about their ability to integrate linguistic referring expressions with the discourse context. Reference comprehension and interpretation of accents: AdultsWhen adults interpret spoken referential expressions, they rapidly utilize detailed information about the linguistic expression to identify the most likely referent, This process is embedded in discourse processing mechanisms whereby adults maintain a mental representation of the entities in the current discourse situation (e.g., van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983;Kintsch, 1988;Johnson-Laird, 1983;Bransford, Barclay & Franks, 1972, Bower & Morrow, 1990; Sanford Address correspondence to: Jennifer Arnold, CB #3270 Davie Hall, Rm. 337B, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3270, 919-843-5737, fax: 919-962-2537, jarnold@email.unc.edu. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing th...

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Stress patterns of early child language

Cited by 61 publications

References 8 publications

Cross-linguistic expression of contrastive accent: Clinical assessment in Spanish and English

Cross-linguistic expression of contrastive accent: Clinical assessment in Spanish and English

Is there really an asymmetry in the acquisition of the focus-to-accentuation mapping?

THE BACON not the bacon: How children and adults understand accented and unaccented noun phrases

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