Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, 20009 Donostia-San Sebastián, Gipuzkoa, Spain; MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University, Penrith, New South Wales 2751, Australia.
MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University, Penrith, New South Wales 2751, Australia.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2020 Nov;199:104916. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2020.104916. Epub 2020 Jul 15.
Experienced language users are able to predict when conversational turns approach completion, which allows them to attend to and comprehend their interlocutor's speech while planning and accurately timing their response. Adults primarily rely on lexico-syntactic cues to make such predictions, but it remains unknown what cues support these predictions in young children whose lexico-syntactic competence is still developing. This study assessed children's reliance on prosodic cues, specifically when predicting conversational turn transitions in infant-directed speech (IDS), the speech register that they encounter in day-to-day interactions that is characterized by exaggerated prosody compared with adult-directed speech (ADS). Young children (1- and 3-year-olds) completed an anticipatory looking paradigm in which their gaze patterns were recorded while they observed conversations that were produced in IDS or ADS and that contained prosodically complete utterances (lexico-syntactic and prosodic cues) and prosodically incomplete utterances (only lexico-syntactic cues). The 1-year-olds anticipated more turns that were signaled by prosodic cues (i.e., prosodically complete utterances) only in IDS, whereas the 3-year-olds did so in both IDS and ADS. These findings indicate that children anticipate the completion of conversational turns by relying on prosodic information in speech and that the prosodic exaggeration of IDS supports this ability while children's linguistic and conversational skills are still developing.
有经验的语言使用者能够预测会话回合何时接近完成，这使他们能够在关注和理解对话者的讲话的同时，计划并准确地把握自己的回应时间。成年人主要依赖词汇语法线索来做出这种预测，但在词汇语法能力仍在发展的幼儿中，支持这些预测的线索是什么，目前还不清楚。本研究评估了儿童对韵律线索的依赖程度，特别是在预测婴儿指向性言语 (IDS) 中的会话回合转换时，他们在日常互动中遇到的言语寄存器与成人指向性言语 (ADS) 相比，具有夸张的韵律。幼儿（1 岁和 3 岁）完成了一个预期的注视范式，在这个范式中，他们的注视模式被记录下来，同时他们观察了在 IDS 或 ADS 中产生的对话，这些对话包含韵律完整的话语（词汇语法和韵律线索）和韵律不完整的话语（只有词汇语法线索）。1 岁的幼儿仅在 IDS 中通过韵律线索（即韵律完整的话语）来预测更多的回合，而 3 岁的幼儿则在 IDS 和 ADS 中都这样做。这些发现表明，儿童通过依赖言语中的韵律信息来预测会话回合的完成，而 IDS 的韵律夸张则支持了这种能力，同时儿童的语言和会话技能仍在发展。
