RES LEAVE - LEXICAL REPRESENTATION OF VA

This project explored the extent to which infants can identify the lexically relevant prosodic signal in the face of the variability that characterizes prosodic phonology (e.g., tone, pitch accent and intonation).

By 1.5 years, infants production and perception are sensitive to the distinction between lexical and non-lexical properties of pitch phonology. In Swedish and Japanese word production, there is evidence for across-context stability in pitch contour characteristics that are lexical in nature. By contrast, 1.5-year-olds production of nonlexical pitch features (e.g., sentence stress, phrase initial rise) has not fully converged with adult norms.