While it is well known that prosodic features are central in the conveyance of pragmatic
meaning across languages, developmental research has assessed a narrow set of
pragmatic functions of prosody. Research on prosodic development has focused on
early infancy, with the subsequent preschool ages and beyond having received less
attention. This study sets out to explore how young preschoolers develop the ability
to use prosody to express pragmatic meanings while taking into account children’s
Theory ...
While it is well known that prosodic features are central in the conveyance of pragmatic
meaning across languages, developmental research has assessed a narrow set of
pragmatic functions of prosody. Research on prosodic development has focused on
early infancy, with the subsequent preschool ages and beyond having received less
attention. This study sets out to explore how young preschoolers develop the ability
to use prosody to express pragmatic meanings while taking into account children’s
Theory of Mind (ToM) development. Though ToM has been suggested to be linked to the
development of receptive prosody, little is known about its relationship with expressive
prosodic skills. A total of 102 3- to 4-year-old Catalan-speaking children were assessed
for their pragmatic prosody skills using 35 picture-supported prompts revolving around
a variety of social scenarios, as well as for their ToM skills. The responses were analyzed
for prosodic appropriateness. The analyses revealed that 3- to 4-year-olds successfully
produced prosody to encode basic expressive acts and unbiased speech acts such
as information-seeking questions. Yet they had more trouble with complex expressive
acts and biased speech acts such as the ones that convey speakers’ beliefs. Further
analyses showed that ToM alone is not sufficient to explain children’s prosodic score,
but the prosodic performance in some pragmatic areas (unbiased pragmatic meanings)
was predicted by the interaction between ToM and age. Overall, this evidence for the
acquisition of pragmatic prosody by young preschoolers demonstrates the importance
of bridging the gap between prosody and pragmatics when accounting for prosodic
developmental profiles, as well as taking into account the potential influence of ToM and
other socio-cognitive and language skills in this development.
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