| The role prosodic cues like intonation, rhythm, and rate of speech play in aspects of communication such as speech segmentation, grammar acquisition, and discourse pragmatics are well established. In addition, extensive research has investigated the role infant directed speech (IDS) plays in language acquisition and development. However, little work has examined the role of prosodic cues in children's interpretation of word meaning, particularly for non-emotion words. The present investigation is an acoustic analysis of the extent to which speakers produce reliable prosodic correlates to meaning across a range of semantic domains, and whether parents use these kinds of cues to teach word meanings to children. In Study l, acoustic properties including fundamental frequency (Fo), Fo variation, mean duration, and mean amplitude of infant-directed utterances were examined. Speakers were asked to produce question phrases in which novel words were used to convey one of two meanings from a set of antonym pairs (e.g., big/small, yummy/yucky). Acoustic analyses revealed that each word meaning was associated with a unique acoustic signature, and that related word meanings such as Big and Tall and Small and Short had similar acoustic profiles. Study 2 explored whether naturalistic parental speech to young children recruits similar acoustic properties in the service of providing prosodic cues to meaning. Results demonstrated that mothers systematically varied prosodic cues as a function of word meaning when interacting with their children. These findings suggest that speech directed to infants contains reliable prosodic markers to word meaning and that mothers may use prosodic cues to differentiate word meanings. Based on these findings, I argue that speakers recruit prosodic cues associated with word meaning using a variety of approaches including positive/negative valence, iconicity, and particularly simulation. |
