The structure and development of French prosodic representations

Prosody is assumed to play a crucial role during the preverbal stage of infancy, as well as to be essential for the pragmatics of speech. Our experiments are aimed at analyzing the production and perception of illocutionary forms. Using a semantic neutralization procedure, the performance of children (5, 7, and 9 years old) and adults was compared in two experiments focusing on prosodic representations in production and perception tasks. The first experiment investigated subjects' control of prosody in the unfolding of utterances by studying the acoustic configurations of four illocutionary forms, two corresponding to the linguistic mode (assertion, interrogation) and two corresponding to the emotional mode (happiness, sadness). The second experiment examined subjects' identification of the same illocutionary forms as above, plus an additional form, irony, all produced by an expert speaker, using a word-by-word gating procedure. During speech production, control of the fundamental frequency of the voice emerged earlier in childhood (5-year-olds) than control of rhythmic parameters (7-year-olds) for the linguistic mode, whereas control of all parameters was achieved by the age of five for the emotional mode. Children were similar to adults with respect to the planning of intonation and they used it right from the beginning of the sentence, which was not the case for the planning of duration. During speech perception, only adults were able to anticipate illocutionary forms. Taken together, the results strengthen the idea that prosodic representations are acquired gradually during development, and they show that pitch contour is acquired before duration parameters.