University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA.
J Child Lang. 2020 Nov;47(6):1132-1169. doi: 10.1017/S0305000919000916. Epub 2020 Mar 20.
This study explores how young children infer nuances in epistemic modality through prosody. A forced-choice task was used, testing children's (ages three to seven) comprehension of the might/will distinction (modal condition) as well their ability to modulate the strength of might through two prosodic tunes (prosody condition). Positive and negative valence conditions were included. Younger children were shown to start off performing above chance for the modal condition, and at around chance for the prosody condition, but after age four performance on the prosody condition quickly improved. For both modal verbs and prosody, children performed significantly better when valence was positive. By age seven, children performed at ceiling for all conditions. Qualitative analysis of children's justifications for prosody responses showed metalinguistic awareness of prosodic meaning as early as age four, with the ability to relate prosody to epistemic modal meaning becoming quite common by age seven.
本研究探讨了幼儿如何通过韵律来推断认识情态的细微差别。采用了强制选择任务，测试了儿童（3 至 7 岁）对might/will 区别（情态条件）的理解能力，以及他们通过两种韵律曲调（韵律条件）调节might 强度的能力。还包括了积极和消极的条件。研究发现，年幼的儿童在模态条件下的表现一开始就高于随机水平，而在韵律条件下则接近随机水平，但在 4 岁以后，韵律条件下的表现迅速提高。对于模态动词和韵律，当情感为正时，儿童的表现明显更好。到 7 岁时，儿童在所有条件下的表现都达到了上限。对儿童对韵律反应的理由进行的定性分析表明，早在 4 岁时就已经有了对韵律意义的元语言意识，而到 7 岁时，将韵律与认识情态意义联系起来的能力已经相当普遍。
