Prosodic differences between declaratives and interrogatives in infant-directed speech

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 968-994 ◽  
Author(s):  
SUSAN GEFFEN ◽  
TOBEN H. MINTZ
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
American English ◽  
Standard American English ◽  
Prosodic Cues ◽  
Syntax Acquisition ◽  
Syntactic Information ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Syntactic Properties ◽  
Maternal Speech

AbstractIn many languages, declaratives and interrogatives differ in word order properties, and in syntactic organization more broadly. Thus, in order to learn the distinct syntactic properties of the two sentence types, learners must first be able to distinguish them using non-syntactic information. Prosodic information is often assumed to be a useful basis for this type of discrimination, although no systematic studies of the prosodic cues available to infants have been reported. Analysis of maternal speech in three Standard American English-speaking mother–infant dyads found that polar interrogatives differed from declaratives on the patterning of pitch and duration on the final two syllables, butwh-questions did not. Thus, while prosody is unlikely to aid discrimination of declaratives fromwh-questions, infant-directed speech provides prosodic information that infants could use to distinguish declaratives and polar interrogatives. We discuss how learners could leverage this information to identify all question forms, in the context of syntax acquisition.

Nonstandardized Englishes in Mainstream Literacy Practice

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patriann Smith
Keyword(s):  
Literacy Instruction ◽  
English Language ◽  
American English ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Literacy Practice ◽  
Standard American English ◽  
Mainstream Classrooms ◽  
Cultural Boundaries ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The Many

The term Englishes refers to the many different varieties of the English, and represents both standardized and nonstandardized forms. Nonstandardized Englishes is used to refer to Englishes that do not adhere to what has been determined to be Standard English within a given context, such that they are referred to as dialects, Creoles, or New Englishes (e.g., African American English). Standardized Englishes is used to refer to the counterparts of the nonstandardized Englishes that have been typically adopted for use in literacy classrooms (e.g., Standard American English). The field of literacy has addressed nonstandardized Englishes by either focusing on the nonstandardized varieties in isolation from standardized Englishes or by advancing literacy instruction in mainstream classrooms that emphasizes dialect-English speakers’ mastery of standardized Englishes. This approach reflects standard monolingual English ideology and traditional notions of the English language. Operating based on standard monolingual English perspectives implicitly reinforces the view that standardized Englishes and their users are privileged and that speakers of nonstandardized Englishes and their users are inferior. In addition, adhering to traditional notions of English based on their geographical and nation-based use, as opposed to their function based on school, offline, or online contexts regardless of geography, reinforces the concept of the English language as a system and fails to emphasize its communicative and contextual purposes as demanded by our postmodern era of globalization, transnationalism, and internationalization. A translingual approach to Englishes can serve as an alternative to current ways of thinking about literacy instruction because it addresses the needs of both standardized and nonstandardized English-speaking populations. Literacy instruction reframed based on this approach is critical for students’ successful interaction across linguistic and cultural boundaries in the context of the 21st century.

Black English and Standard American English Constrasts in Consonantal Development of Four and Five-Year Old Children

1981 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 274-280 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry N. Seymour ◽  
Charlena M. Seymour
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Black English ◽  
Contrastive Analysis ◽  
White Children ◽  
Standard American English ◽  
Black And White ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Error Types

Four- and five-year old black and white children of black English and standard American English backgrounds, respectively, were administered a standard articulation test. A contrastive analysis revealed phonological differences in consonantal development between the two dialectal groups. However, contrasts were reflected more in number of developmental errors than in form of errors. Thus, the extent of differences noted between adult phonologies of black English and standard American English were less evident in emerging phonologies since unique error types were not exclusively characteristic of either group. These findings have implications for articulation testing of black English speaking children who have not acquired their adult phonology.

scholarly journals The impact of the quality of maternal speech on infants’ segmentation abilities

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melanie Steffi Schreiner ◽  
Nivedita Mani
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Speech Segmentation ◽  
Early Language ◽  
Linguistic Differences ◽  
Standard American English ◽  
Long Term Consequences ◽  
Maternal Speech ◽  
The Impact

Across cultures, infants are typically addressed using a special speech register, called infant-directed speech (IDS). Infants appear to benefit from being addressed in this register, although there seem to be some cross-linguistic differences in their learning from IDS. One possible explanation for these differences is that children from different backgrounds are addressed in a less exaggerated register than standard American English IDS. Against this background, we examined whether German 7.5-month-olds are able to segment words from exaggerated IDS and standard German IDS. Furthermore, in order to evaluate the potential long-term consequences of continued exposure to less or more exaggerated IDS, we also examined the impact of individual differences in maternal IDS on early speech segmentation. We found that 7.5-month-old infants were able to segment words from exaggerated, but not from standard German IDS. A potential explanation for this result comes from our finding that infants whose mothers used more exaggerated IDS were able to also segment words from standard German IDS. Taken together, the current study a) underlines the importance of IDS in early language acquisition, b) demonstrates successful exaggerated IDS segmentation abilities, and c) presents a possible explanation for cross-linguistic differences in infants’ segmentation abilities reported in the literature.

Effects of Childhood Stuttering on Attention Regulation in Emotionally Arousing Situations

2006 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Lee Bush
Keyword(s):  
Preschool Children ◽  
American English ◽  
Book Reading ◽  
Production Task ◽  
Attention Regulation ◽  
Standard American English ◽  
Normal Limits ◽  
Narrative Production ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Two Indices

The purpose of this study was to examine the relation between children’s attention regulation and stuttering in three different emotionally arousing situations. Participants were 15 monolingual, Standard American English speaking, preschool children who stutter (CWS) and 17 monolingual Standard American English speaking, preschool children who do not stutter (CWNS) between the ages of 3; 0 (years; months) and 5; 7. All participants had speech, language, and hearing development within normal limits, with the exception of stuttering for CWS. Measures included two indices of attention regulation (i.e., looks away from the computer monitor and off-topic statements), that were observed during the first three minutes of a “book reading” narrative production task. This task occurred immediately after listening to a pre-recorded emotionally arousing background conversation (negative, positive, and neutral). It was predicted that children who stutter would less efficiently regulate their attention in a negative emotionally arousing situation. Main findings indicated that CWS take fewer looks away from the computer monitor than CWNS during the narrative task and that it initially takes CWS longer to first look away from the computer monitor than CWNS. Findings were taken to suggest that CWS fixate their attention on a stimulus and are less able to disengage when required and/or appropriate while CWNS have the ability to flexibly shift their attention away from the same stimulus, especially in a negative arousing situation.

Backward mimicry and forward influence in prosodic contour choice in standard American English

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agustín Gravano ◽  
Štefan Beňuš ◽  
Rivka Levitan ◽  
Julia Hirschberg
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Standard American English

scholarly journals Corpus-based analysis of the collocational profiles of the terms denoting the mentally challenged

2017 ◽  
Vol 81 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Liana Markelova
Keyword(s):  
Public Perception ◽  
American English ◽  
Public Attitude ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Web Pages ◽  
Gradual Change ◽  
Web Based ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Semantic Prosody

The present study aims to trace the evolution of public attitude towards the mentally challenged by means of the corpus-based analysis. The raw data comes from the two of the BYU corpora: Global Web-Based English (GloWbE) and Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). The former is comprised of 1.8 million web pages from 20 English-speaking countries (Davies/Fuchs 2015: 1) and provides an opportunity to research at a cross-cultural level, whereas the latter, containing 400 million words from more than 100,000 texts ranging from the 1810s to the 2000s (Davies 2012: 121), allows to carry on a diachronic research on the issue. To identify the difference in attitudes the collocational profiles of the terms denoting the mentally challenged were created. Having analysed them in terms of their semantic prosody one might conclude that there are certain semantic shifts that occurred due to the modern usage preferences and gradual change in public perception of everything strange, unusual and unique.

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