Jove
Visualize
Contact Us
JoVE
x logofacebook logolinkedin logoyoutube logo
ABOUT JoVE
OverviewLeadershipBlogJoVE Help Center
AUTHORS
Publishing ProcessEditorial BoardScope & PoliciesPeer ReviewFAQSubmit
LIBRARIANS
TestimonialsSubscriptionsAccessResourcesLibrary Advisory BoardFAQ
RESEARCH
JoVE JournalMethods CollectionsJoVE Encyclopedia of ExperimentsArchive
EDUCATION
JoVE CoreJoVE BusinessJoVE Science EducationJoVE Lab ManualFaculty Resource CenterFaculty Site
Terms & Conditions of Use
Privacy Policy
Policies

Related Experiment Videos

Does sentential prosody help infants organize and remember speech information?

D R Mandel1, P W Jusczyk, D G Nelson

  • 1Department of Psychology, State University of New York at Buffalo, 14260.

Cognition
|November 1, 1994
PubMed
Summary

Infants remember linked words better when they are part of a sentence clause, not a list. Prosody helps young infants organize and recall spoken language, aiding language acquisition.

Related Concept Videos

You might also read

Related Articles

Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.

Sort by
Same author

Mathematically aggregating experts' predictions of possible futures.

PloS one·2021
Same author

Do infants segment words or recurring contiguous patterns?

Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance·2001
Same author

Cross-language word segmentation by 9-month-olds.

Psychonomic bulletin & review·2000
Same author

Phonotactic cues for segmentation of fluent speech by infants.

Cognition·2000
Same author

The role of talker-specific information in word segmentation by infants.

Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance·2000
Same author

The beginnings of word segmentation in english-learning infants.

Cognitive psychology·2000

Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Linguistics
  • Cognitive Science

Background:

  • Language acquisition theories link prosody and syntax.
  • Infants are sensitive to prosodic markers of syntactic units.
  • Previous research lacks evidence on prosody's impact on infant speech encoding.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate if 2-month-old infants use sentence prosody to organize and remember speech.
  • To determine if prosodic grouping influences phonetic memory in infants.

Main Methods:

  • Two experiments tested 2-month-old infants' memory for spoken words.
  • Experiment 1 compared memory for prosodically linked words in a clause versus a list.
  • Experiment 2 compared memory for prosodically linked words within a clause versus across clauses.

Related Experiment Videos

Main Results:

  • Infants showed better phonetic memory for words prosodically linked within a clause compared to a list.
  • Infants also demonstrated enhanced memory for words prosodically linked within a single clausal unit versus across two fragments.
  • Prosodic organization significantly impacts infants' spoken information recall.

Conclusions:

  • Prosodic organization of speech into clausal units enhances infants' memory for spoken information.
  • Findings support the role of prosody in early speech encoding and language acquisition.
  • Early use of prosody suggests a foundational mechanism for language development.