The Multimodal Perception of Contrastive Focus in French: A Developmental Study

Abstract

The current study aimed to better understand the development of prosody perception, by investigating the audiovisual, audio, and visual perception of contrastive focus in French-speaking adults and children. Specifically, 20 adults and 20 school-aged children were presented with short sentences in audiovisual, audio, and visual modalities and were asked to determine if the sentences were produced under neutral or contrastive focused speech. Target words incorporated into the sentences varied across four vowels: /i y u a/. Overall, the adults performed significantly better than the children. Moreover, the children relied more on duration cues to identify contrastive focus, while the adults relied more on formant and lip height values. These findings suggest that children acquire visual cues of speech perception as they mature.

Pre‐schoolers use head gestures rather than prosodic cues to highlight important information in speech

“…• Young children use non-referential head gestures, rather than acoustic prosodic cues, to signal the informational status of discourse referents • Children produce more head gestures in contrastive focus than in broad focus conditions, and even more in corrective focus conditions • Young children timely align head gestures with prosodic landmarks, with some unexpected exceptions • When children produce a head gesture, this seems to entrain distinct prosodic (duration and pitch range) modifications of the accompanying speech, independent of focus condition To our knowledge, French-speaking children's acquisition of prosodic focus has been mainly studied at the perception and comprehension levels, but rarely in terms of production skills. Rapin and Ménard (2019) showed that 8-to 10-year-old children are able to detect focus, but (a) their performance is lower than that of adults, and (b) they do not use formant or visual articulatory cues as much as adults do. Szendroi et al (2018) studied focus comprehension in 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old French children (comparing them to German and English), and found that French pre-schoolers show adult-like comprehension of subject and object contrastive focus.…”

“…To our knowledge, French‐speaking children's acquisition of prosodic focus has been mainly studied at the perception and comprehension levels, but rarely in terms of production skills. Rapin and Ménard (2019) showed that 8‐ to 10‐year‐old children are able to detect focus, but (a) their performance is lower than that of adults, and (b) they do not use formant or visual articulatory cues as much as adults do. Szendroi et al.…”

The Prosody of Two-Syllable Words in French-Speaking Monolingual and Bilingual Children: A Focus on Initial Accent and Final Accent

“…Important to note, however, is that Vihman and colleagues (1998) did not take into consideration the intonation of French in which initial syllables may optionally receive a pitch accent. More recently, Ménard and colleagues have investigated the acoustic and articulatory correlates of contrastive focus in French-speaking children and adults (Ménard et al, 2006;Ménard et al, 2020;Rapin & Ménard, 2019). Contrastive focus is a type of narrow focus in which the speaker gives emphasis to a specific constituent as opposed to emphasizing another constituent in a paradigmatic comparison (e.g., the word John receives contrastive focus in the sentence "No, I saw John" in response to the question "Did you see Mary?").…”