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

Abstract

This study examined the acoustic characteristics of disyllabic words produced by French-speaking monolingual and bilingual children, aged 2;6 to 6;10, and by adults. Specifically, it investigated the influence of age, bilingualism, and vocabulary on final-to-initial syllable duration ratios and on the presence of initial and final accent. Children and adults took part in a word-naming task in which they produced a controlled set of disyllabic words. Duration and maximum pitch were measured for each syllable of the disyllabic word and these values were inserted into mixed-effects statistical models. Results indicated that children as young as 2;6 obtained final-to-initial syllable duration ratios similar to those of adults. Young children realized accent on the initial syllable more often and accent on the final syllable less often than older children and adults. There was no influence of bilingualism on the duration and pitch characteristics of disyllabic words. Children aged 2;6 with smaller vocabularies produced initial accent more often than children with large vocabularies. Our findings suggest that early word productions are constrained by developmental tendencies favouring falling pitch across an utterance.

Fundamental Frequency Contour (Melody) of Infant Vocalizations across the First Year

“…The DA share was about 15-20% in C and NC over the first 6 months of life. The high share compared to other unsegmented melodies (TA, MA) may have two reasons: (1) a doubling of basic building blocks is the simplest strategy in generating complexity, so one could expect this stage to occur frequently, (2) a high occurrence of double-arc melodies in pre-speech utterances could point to their significance for the acquisition of disyllabic words [34][35][36]. It was particularly interesting that the high DA share was typical for NC during the first months of life and for marginal babbling across 7-12 months, while TA and MA structures occurred comparatively less frequent (cf.…”