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Updated: Jul 9, 2026
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Behavioral Assessment of Hearing in 2 to 4 Year-old Children: A Two-interval, Observer-based Procedure Using Conditioned Play-based Responses
Published on: January 23, 2017
Acoustic emphasis in four year olds
Elizabeth Wonnacott1, Duane G Watson
1Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, OX1 1UD, UK. elizabeth.wonnacott@psy.ox.ac.uk
Cognition
|December 12, 2007
Summary
Four-year-olds use acoustic prominence, or emphasis, in speech to highlight new information and accessible given words. This shows children develop adult-like sensitivity to discourse distinctions by age four.
Area of Science:
- Child language acquisition
- Developmental psycholinguistics
- Phonetics and phonology
Background:
- Acoustic prominence in speech signals subtle discourse distinctions.
- Limited understanding of how children develop the ability to produce acoustic prominence.
- Need for research on early production of acoustic prominence in spontaneous speech.
Purpose of the Study:
- Investigate factors influencing acoustic prominence production in young children.
- Examine how 4-year-olds use acoustic emphasis in spontaneous speech.
- Determine if children's use of acoustic prominence aligns with adult patterns.
Main Methods:
- Elicited spontaneous speech from 4-year-old children.
- Used Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) sentence structures.
- Children described video-presented events to elicit target sentences.
Main Results:
- Children placed greater acoustic prominence on 'new' words.
- Emphasis was also placed on 'given' words that shifted to a more accessible discourse position.
- Findings align with recent studies on acoustic prominence in adult speech.
Conclusions:
- By age four, children demonstrate adult-like production of acoustic prominence.
- Children exhibit sensitivity to various discourse distinctions through acoustic emphasis.
- Early development of acoustic prominence production reflects sophisticated linguistic awareness.
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