Children’s Production of Word Accents in Swedish Revisited

The two word accents in Stockholm Swedish (Accent I and Accent II) are distinguished by a consistent falling pitch contour on the stressed syllable of Accent II words. The current study presents new types of evidence that this feature of word accent can be systematically found in words produced by 16- to 18-monthold Swedish-speaking children. Compared to other disyllabic productions, the stressed syllable in Accent II words have a larger F0 decline, more sequences of high-low turning points identified by a stylized contour algorithm and an earlier F0 peak. In addition, a negative correlation is found between the value of F0 peak and F0 change in the stressed syllable. Taken together, these findings indicate that children learning Swedish have internalized a subtle but lexically relevant pitch contour by a very early stage of word production.

[1]  P. Jusczyk,et al.  Infants' use of synchronized visual information to separate streams of speech. , 2005, Child development.

[2]  Tonal word accents produced by Swedish 18- and 24- month-olds , 2005 .

[3]  D. Bull,et al.  Infants' discrimination of final syllable fundamental frequency in multisyllabic stimuli. , 1985, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[4]  Mitsuhiko Ota.  The Development of Lexical Pitch Accent Systems: An Autosegmental Analysis , 2003, Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique.

[5]  E. Gibson,et al.  Principles of Perceptual Learning and Development , 1973 .

[6]  R. K. Clifton,et al.  Infant pitch perception: evidence for responding to pitch categories and the missing fundamental. , 1985, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[7]  Christopher G. Prince,et al.  Synching models with infants: a perceptual-level model of infant audio-visual synchrony detection , 2005, Cognitive Systems Research.

[8]  M G Clarkson,et al.  Infants' pitch perception: masking by low- and high-frequency noises. , 1997, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[9]  Charles N. Li,et al.  The acquisition of tone in Mandarin-speaking children , 1977, Journal of Child Language.

[10]  Katherine Demuth.  Problems in the acquisition of grammatical tone , 1989 .

[11]  Olle Engstrand.  Phonetic Interpretation of the Word Accent Contrast in Swedish , 1995 .

[12]  Pierre A. Hallé,et al.  Beginnings of Prosodic Organization: Intonation and Duration Patterns of Disyllables Produced by Japanese and French Infants , 1991, Language and speech.

[13]  E. Gibson.  Principles of Perceptual Learning and Development , 1969 .

[14]  B. Dodd,et al.  The phonological acquisition of Putonghua (Modern Standard Chinese) , 2000, Journal of Child Language.

[15]  Thierry Nazzi,et al.  DISCRIMINATION OF PITCH CONTOURS BY NEONATES , 1998 .

[16]  E. Grabe.  Pitch accent realization in English and German , 1998 .

[17]  G. Bruce.  Swedish word accents in sentence perspective , 1977 .

[18]  Olle Engstrand.  Phonetic Interpretation of the Word Accent Contrast in Swedish: Evidence from Spontaneous Speech , 1997 .

[19]  R G Karzon,et al.  Syllabic pitch perception in 2- to 3-month-old infants , 1989, Perception & psychophysics.

[20]  Y. Erikson,et al.  Fundamental frequency correlates of the grave word accent in Swedish: the effect of vowel duration , 1972 .

[21]  Beata Schmid,et al.  A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF CHILDREN'S AND ADULTS’ ACQUISITION OF TONE ACCENTS IN SWEDISH1 , 1986 .

[22]  K. Demuth.  Issues in the acquisition of the Sesotho tonal system , 1993, Journal of Child Language.

[23]  Daniel Hirst,et al.  Automatic modelling of fundamental frequency using a quadratic sline function , 1993 .

[24]  L. Gogate,et al.  Attention to Maternal Multimodal Naming by 6- to 8-Month-Old Infants and Learning of Word-Object Relations. , 2006, Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant Studies.

[25]  Francis Nolan,et al.  Pitch accent realization in four varieties of British English , 2000, J. Phonetics.

[26]  P. Boersma.  ACCURATE SHORT-TERM ANALYSIS OF THE FUNDAMENTAL FREQUENCY AND THE HARMONICS-TO-NOISE RATIO OF A SAMPLED SOUND , 1993 .

[27]  D. Whalen,et al.  Intonational differences between the reduplicative babbling of French- and English-learning infants , 1991, Journal of Child Language.

[28]  D. Slobin.  The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition , 1987 .