Astruc Lluïsa, Payne Elinor, Post Brechtje, Vanrell Maria del Mar, Prieto Pilar
Department of Languages, Faculty of Education and Language Studies, The Open University, Milton, Keynes, UK.
Lang Speech. 2013 Jun;56(Pt 2):229-53. doi: 10.1177/0023830912460494.
This study analyses the scaling and alignment of low and high intonational targets in the speech of 27 children - nine English-speaking, nine Catalan-speaking and nine Spanish-speaking - between the ages of two and six years. We compared the intonational patterns of words controlled for number of syllables and stress position in the child speech to the adult target speech provided by their mothers, and to a dataset of adult-directed speech recorded at a later stage for the purpose of measuring pitch height. A corpus of 624 utterances was elicited using a controlled naming task and analysed within the Autosegmental Metrical framework. Measuring the pitch height and pitch timing of nuclear pitch accents, we found that once the effects of syllable duration are accounted for, young children reach tonal targets with remarkable precision. Overall, the results indicate that the phonetic aspects of intonation are acquired from a very early age. Even the youngest children show adult-like alignment of the low target, although mastery of the high target increases with age. Young Spanish-speaking children, however, show a more precise attainment of pitch scaling and alignment of their (high) tonal targets than do Catalan and English children; where the ambient language lies within a general prosodic typology appears to influence the acquisition of tonal targets.
本研究分析了27名2至6岁儿童（其中9名说英语、9名说加泰罗尼亚语、9名说西班牙语）言语中高低语调目标的缩放和对齐情况。我们将儿童言语中根据音节数量和重音位置控制的单词的语调模式，与他们母亲提供的成人目标言语，以及后期为测量音高而录制的面向成人的言语数据集进行了比较。使用受控命名任务引出了一个包含624个话语的语料库，并在自主分段韵律框架内进行了分析。通过测量核音高重音的音高高度和音高时长，我们发现一旦考虑到音节时长的影响，幼儿就能非常精确地达到语调目标。总体而言，结果表明语调的语音方面在很小的时候就已习得。即使是最小的孩子也表现出与成人相似的低目标对齐，尽管对高目标的掌握程度会随着年龄增长而提高。然而，说西班牙语的幼儿在音高缩放和（高）语调目标对齐方面，比说加泰罗尼亚语和英语的儿童表现得更精确；环境语言所处的一般韵律类型似乎会影响语调目标的习得。
