ICREA-Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain.
J Child Lang. 2012 Mar;39(2):221-57. doi: 10.1017/S030500091100002X. Epub 2011 Jun 21.
This investigation focuses on the development of intonation patterns in four Catalan-speaking children and two Spanish-speaking children between 0 ; 11 and 2 ; 4. Pitch contours were prosodically analyzed within the Autosegmental Metrical framework in all meaningful utterances, for a total of 6558 utterances. The pragmatic meaning and communicative function were also assessed. Three main conclusions arise from the results. First, the study shows that the Autosegmental Metrical model can be successfully used to transcribe early intonation contours. Second, results reveal that children's emerging intonation is largely independent of grammatical development, and generally it develops well before the appearance of two-word combinations. As for the relationship between lexical and intonational development, the data show that the emergence of intonational grammar is related to the onset of speech and the presence of a small lexicon. Finally, we discuss the implications of these results for the biological hypothesis of intonational production.
本研究聚焦于 4 名讲加泰罗尼亚语和 2 名讲西班牙语的儿童在 0 岁 11 个月至 2 岁 4 个月期间的语调模式发展。在所有有意义的话语中，使用韵律分析方法在自动段韵律框架内对音高轮廓进行了分析，总计 6558 个话语。还评估了语用意义和交际功能。研究结果得出了三个主要结论。首先，该研究表明，自动段韵律模型可以成功地用于转录早期的语调轮廓。其次，结果表明，儿童新兴的语调在很大程度上独立于语法发展，通常在出现两个词组合之前就已经很好地发展了。至于词汇和语调发展之间的关系，数据显示，语调语法的出现与言语的出现和小词汇的存在有关。最后，我们讨论了这些结果对语调产生的生物假设的影响。
