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Advances in the Acquisition of Prosody
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Advances in the Acquisition of Prosody

A special issue of Languages (ISSN 2226-471X).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (20 December 2024) | Viewed by 4726

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. Mariapaola D'Imperio

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Aix-Marseille Université & LPL, CNRS, BP 80975, 13604 Aix-en-Provence, France
Interests: prosody; intonation; phonetics; laboratory phonology; language acquisition; speech perception
Prof. Dr. Sónia Frota

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Center of Linguistics, University of Lisbon, 1600-214 Lisboa, Portugal
Interests: prosody; language acquisition; language development; language disorders; experimental linguistics; multimodal perception
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

We are guest editing a Special Issue of Languages entitled ‘Advances in the Acquisition of Prosody’.

Prosody is central to language and communication; it comprises sub-syllabic units to sentence and discourse-level units and interfaces with segmental phonology, morphology, and syntax. It is relevant to information structure and pragmatics and plays a key role in language processing and language acquisition. Prosodic impairments may considerably affect social interactions and typical language development. It is thus crucial to understand how prosody is acquired and how it develops in first-language, second-language, and multilingual settings, in perception and production, and in typical and atypical language development. Arriving at a comprehensive picture of the acquisition of prosody requires input from diverse disciplines such as language sciences, psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, speech therapy, speech and hearing science, or computer science. This Special Issue aims to advance current knowledge on the acquisition of prosody, taking advantage of recent theoretical and methodological developments in language-related fields, as well as of interdisciplinary undertakings.

We invite cutting-edge original work on prosodic acquisition and development and all approaches to investigating the acquisition of prosody are welcome, including theoretical, instrumental, behavioral, perceptual, electrophysiological and neuroimaging studies. Under-represented languages, topics, or populations, and cross-linguistic or interdisciplinary contributions are particularly welcome.

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 200 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the guest editors (mdimperio2@gmail.com and sfrota@edu.ulisboa.pt ) and to Languages editorial office (languages@mdpi.com). Abstracts will be reviewed by the guest editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the special issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.

Tentative Completion Schedule

Abstract Submission Deadline: 30 September 2024
Notification of Abstract Acceptance: 11 October 2024
Full Manuscript Deadline: 20 December 2024

Prof. Dr. Mariapaola D’Imperio
Prof. Dr. Sónia Frota
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Languages is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • language acquisition
  • language development
  • prosody
  • intonation
  • rhythm
  • phrasing
  • prominence
  • stress
  • tone
  • language impairment
  • multimodal prosody
  • atypical prosody
  • word prosody
  • phrasal prosody
  • production of prosody
  • perception of prosody
  • infants
  • toddlers
  • children

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Published Papers (6 papers)

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Research

25 pages, 2054 KiB  
Article
Perception and Interpretation of Contrastive Pitch Accent During Spoken Language Processing in Autistic Children
by Pumpki Lei Su, Duane G. Watson, Stephen Camarata and James Bodfish
Languages 2025, 10(7), 161; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages10070161 - 28 Jun 2025
Viewed by 187
Abstract
Although prosodic differences in autistic individuals have been widely documented, little is known about their ability to perceive and interpret specific prosodic features, such as contrastive pitch accent—a prosodic signal that places emphasis and helps listeners distinguish between competing referents in discourse. This [...] Read more.
Although prosodic differences in autistic individuals have been widely documented, little is known about their ability to perceive and interpret specific prosodic features, such as contrastive pitch accent—a prosodic signal that places emphasis and helps listeners distinguish between competing referents in discourse. This study addresses that gap by investigating the extent to which autistic children can (1) perceive contrastive pitch accent (i.e., discriminate contrastive pitch accent differences in speech); (2) interpret contrastive pitch accent (i.e., use prosodic cues to guide real-time language comprehension); and (3) the extent to which their ability to interpret contrastive pitch accent is associated with broader language and social communication skills, including receptive prosody, pragmatic language, social communication, and autism severity. Twenty-four autistic children and 24 neurotypical children aged 8 to 14 completed an AX same–different task and a visual-world paradigm task to assess their ability to perceive and interpret contrastive pitch accent. Autistic children demonstrated the ability to perceive and interpret contrastive pitch accent, as evidenced by comparable discrimination ability to neurotypical peers on the AX task and real-time revision of visual attention based on prosodic cues in the visual-world paradigm. However, autistic children showed significantly slower reaction time during the AX task, and a subgroup of autistic children with language impairment showed significantly slower processing of contrastive pitch accent during the visual-world paradigm task. Additionally, speed of contrastive pitch accent processing was significantly associated with pragmatic language skills and autism symptom severity in autistic children. Overall, these findings suggest that while autistic children as a group are able to discriminate prosodic forms and interpret the pragmatic function of contrastive pitch accent during spoken language comprehension, differences in prosody processing in autistic children may be reflected not in accuracy, but in speed of processing measures and in specific subgroups defined by language ability. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in the Acquisition of Prosody)
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32 pages, 5438 KiB  
Article
Intonational Focus Marking by Syrian Arabic Learners of German: On the Role of Cross-Linguistic Influence and Proficiency
by Zarah Kampschulte, Angelika Braun and Katharina Zahner-Ritter
Languages 2025, 10(7), 155; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages10070155 - 25 Jun 2025
Viewed by 247
Abstract
Acquiring prosodic focus marking in a second language (L2) is difficult for learners whose native language utilizes strategies that differ from those of the target language. German typically uses pitch accents (L+H*/H*) to mark focus, while (Modern Standard) Arabic preferably employs a syntactic [...] Read more.
Acquiring prosodic focus marking in a second language (L2) is difficult for learners whose native language utilizes strategies that differ from those of the target language. German typically uses pitch accents (L+H*/H*) to mark focus, while (Modern Standard) Arabic preferably employs a syntactic strategy (word order) or lexical means. In Syrian Arabic, a variety which is predominantly oral, pitch accents are used to mark focus, but the distribution and types are different from German. The present study investigates how Syrian Arabic learners of German prosodically mark focus in L2 German. A question–answer paradigm was used to elicit German subject-verb-object (SVO)-sentences with broad, narrow, or contrastive focus. Productions of advanced (C1, N = 17) and intermediate (B1/B2, N = 8) Syrian Arabic learners were compared to those of German controls (N = 12). Like the controls, both learner groups successfully placed pitch accents on focused constituents. However, learners, especially those with lower proficiency, used more pitch accents in non-focal regions than the controls, revealing challenges in de-accentuation. These may result from the larger number of phrase boundaries in learners’ productions, which in turn might be explained by transfer from the L1 or aspects of general fluency. Learners also differed from the controls with respect to accent type. They predominantly used H* for narrow or contrastive focus (instead of L+H*); proficiency effects played only a minor role here. Our study hence reveals an intricate interplay between cross-linguistic influence and proficiency in the L2 acquisition of prosodic focus marking, targeting a language pair so far underrepresented in the literature (German vs. Syrian Arabic). Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in the Acquisition of Prosody)
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15 pages, 1258 KiB  
Article
Are Children Sensitive to Ironic Prosody? A Novel Task to Settle the Issue
by Francesca Panzeri and Beatrice Giustolisi
Languages 2025, 10(7), 152; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages10070152 - 25 Jun 2025
Viewed by 182
Abstract
Ironic remarks are often pronounced with a distinctive intonation. It is not clear whether children rely on acoustic cues to attribute an ironic intent. This question has been only indirectly tackled, with studies that manipulated the intonation with which the final remark is [...] Read more.
Ironic remarks are often pronounced with a distinctive intonation. It is not clear whether children rely on acoustic cues to attribute an ironic intent. This question has been only indirectly tackled, with studies that manipulated the intonation with which the final remark is pronounced within an irony comprehension task. We propose a new task that is meant to assess whether children rely on prosody to infer speakers’ sincere or ironic communicative intentions, without requiring meta-linguistic judgments (since pragmatic awareness is challenging for young children). Children listen to evaluative remarks (e.g., “That house is really beautiful”), pronounced with sincere or ironic intonation, and they are asked to identify what the speaker is referring to by selecting one of two pictures depicting an image corresponding to a literal interpretation (a luxury house) and one to its reverse interpretation (a hovel). We tested eighty children aged 3 to 11 years and found a clear developmental trend, with children consistently responding above the chance level from age seven, and there was no correlation with the recognition of emotions transmitted through the vocal channel. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in the Acquisition of Prosody)
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17 pages, 666 KiB  
Article
English-Learning Infants’ Developing Sensitivity to Intonation Contours
by Megha Sundara and Sónia Frota
Languages 2025, 10(7), 148; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages10070148 - 20 Jun 2025
Viewed by 177
Abstract
In four experiments, we investigated when and how English-learning infants perceive intonation contours that signal prosodic units. Using visual habituation, we probed infants’ ability to discriminate disyllabic sequences with a fall versus a rise in pitch on the final syllable, a salient cue [...] Read more.
In four experiments, we investigated when and how English-learning infants perceive intonation contours that signal prosodic units. Using visual habituation, we probed infants’ ability to discriminate disyllabic sequences with a fall versus a rise in pitch on the final syllable, a salient cue used to distinguish statements from questions. First, we showed that at 8 months, English-learning infants can distinguish statement falls from question rises, as has been reported previously for their European Portuguese-learning peers who have extensive experience with minimal pairs that differ just in pitch rises and falls. Next, we conducted three experiments involving 4-month-olds to determine the developmental roots of how English-learning infants begin to tune into these intonation contours. In Experiment 2, we showed that unlike 8-month-olds, monolingual English-learning 4-month-olds are unable to distinguish statement and question intonation when they are presented with segmentally varied disyllabic sequences. Monolingual English-learning 4-month-olds only partially succeeded even when tested without segmental variability and a sensitive testing procedure (Experiment 3). When tested with stimuli that had been resynthesized to remove correlated duration cues as well, 4-month-olds demonstrated only partial success (Experiment 4). We discuss our results in the context of extant developmental research on how infants tune into linguistically relevant pitch cues in their first year of life. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in the Acquisition of Prosody)
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33 pages, 3118 KiB  
Article
Preschoolers Mark Focus Types Through Multimodal Prominence: Further Evidence for the Precursor Role of Gestures
by Sara Coego, Núria Esteve-Gibert and Pilar Prieto
Languages 2025, 10(5), 92; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages10050092 - 26 Apr 2025
Viewed by 424
Abstract
The present cross-sectional study assessed the role of multimodal cues in marking focus types during early childhood, focusing on prosodic prominence, gesture presence, and gestural prominence. A total of 116 Catalan-speaking three-, four- and five-year-olds participated in a semi-controlled interactive task eliciting words [...] Read more.
The present cross-sectional study assessed the role of multimodal cues in marking focus types during early childhood, focusing on prosodic prominence, gesture presence, and gestural prominence. A total of 116 Catalan-speaking three-, four- and five-year-olds participated in a semi-controlled interactive task eliciting words in three focus conditions: information, contrastive, and corrective. The data were coded manually using holistic assessments for all three measures. The results indicated, first, that children’s prosodic and gestural behavior was key in marking corrective focus. A significant tendency to use more gestures and increase both prosodic and gestural prominence was found in the corrective focus condition across the three age groups. Second, a developmental difference emerged in the acquisition of contrastive focus. Three-year-olds relied solely on gesture presence to encode contrastive focus, being unable to differentiate it prosodically from information focus. In turn, four- and five-year-olds used both gestures and prosody, with contrastive focus not only receiving more gestures than information focus but also increased prosodic prominence. This finding shows that gesture presence is a precursor to prosodic prominence in marking contrastive focus in Catalan, thus supporting the idea that gesture production can bootstrap the expression of focus type distinctions. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in the Acquisition of Prosody)
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22 pages, 3996 KiB  
Article
How Children With and Without Developmental Language Disorder Use Prosody and Gestures to Process Phrasal Ambiguities
by Albert Giberga, Ernesto Guerra, Nadia Ahufinger, Alfonso Igualada, Mari Aguilera and Núria Esteve-Gibert
Languages 2025, 10(4), 61; https://doi.org/10.3390/languages10040061 - 26 Mar 2025
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1712
Abstract
Prosody is crucial for resolving phrasal ambiguities. Recent research suggests that gestures can enhance this process, which may be especially useful for children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), who have impaired structural language. This study investigates how children with DLD use prosodic and [...] Read more.
Prosody is crucial for resolving phrasal ambiguities. Recent research suggests that gestures can enhance this process, which may be especially useful for children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), who have impaired structural language. This study investigates how children with DLD use prosodic and gestural cues to interpret phrasal ambiguities. Catalan-speaking children with and without DLD heard sentences with two possible interpretations, a high (less common) and low (more common) attachment interpretation of the verb clause. Sentences were presented in three conditions: baseline (no cues to high-attachment interpretation), prosody-only (prosodic cues to high-attachment interpretation), and multimodal (prosodic and gestural cues to high-attachment interpretation). Offline target selection and online gaze patterns were analysed across linguistic (DLD vs. TD) and age groups (5–7 vs. 8–10 years old) to see if multimodal cues facilitate the processing of the less frequent high-attachment interpretation. The offline results revealed that prosodic cues influenced all children’s comprehension of phrasal structures and that gestures provided no benefit beyond prosody. Online data showed that children with DLD struggled to integrate visual information. Our findings underscore that children with DLD can rely on prosodic cues to support sentence comprehension and highlight the importance of integrating multimodal cues in linguistic interactions. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Advances in the Acquisition of Prosody)
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