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Children's Sensitivity to Pitch Variation in Language

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Children's Sensitivity to Pitch Variation in Language University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations Summer 2010 Children's Sensitivity to Pitch Variation in Language Carolyn Quam University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Cognitive Psychology Commons, and the Developmental Psychology Commons Recommended Citation Quam, Carolyn, "Children's Sensitivity to Pitch Variation in Language" (2010). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 232. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/232 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/232 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Children's Sensitivity to Pitch Variation in Language Abstract Children acquire consonant and vowel categories by 12 months, but take much longer to learn to interpret perceptible variation. This dissertation considers children’s interpretation of pitch variation. Pitch operates, often simultaneously, at different levels of linguistic structure. English-learning children must disregard pitch at the lexical level—since English is not a tone language—while still attending to pitch for its other functions. Chapters 1 and 5 outline the learning problem and suggest ways children might solve it. Chapter 2 demonstrates that 2.5-year-olds know pitch cannot differentiate words in English. Chapter 3 finds that not until age 4–5 do children correctly interpret pitch cues to emotions. Chapter 4 demonstrates some sensitivity between 2.5 and 5 years to the pitch cue to lexical stress, but continuing difficulties at the older ages. These findings suggest a lateaject tr ory for interpretation of prosodic variation; throughout, I propose explanations for this protracted time-course. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Psychology First Advisor Daniel Swingley, PhD Keywords language development; psycholinguistics; phonology; prosody Subject Categories Cognitive Psychology | Developmental Psychology This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/232 CHILDREN’S SENSITIVITY TO PITCH VARIATION IN LANGUAGE Carolyn Quam A DISSERTATION in Psychology Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2010 Supervisor of Dissertation _________________________ Daniel Swingley Associate Professor, Psychology Graduate Group Chairperson _________________________ Michael J. Kahana Professor, Psychology Dissertation Committee Delphine Dahan, Associate Professor, Psychology Daniel Swingley, Associate Professor, Psychology John Trueswell, Professor, Psychology Children’s Sensitivity to Pitch Variation in Language 2010 Carolyn Quam This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- ShareAlike 3.0 License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ DEDICATIONS This work is dedicated to Brian, who supported me through the ups and downs of graduate school (and edited this document); to my “Little Sister” Queen, who helped me maintain perspective; to my parents, Kathleen and Michael, and my sisters, Diana and Kristin; and, finally, to Alicia Parlette, whose courage inspired me to write. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Most heartfelt thanks go to my advisor Dan Swingley for his unfailing support and sound advice. Thanks also to current and former members of the Swingley lab, especially Katie Motyka, Jane Park, Allison Britt, Gabriella Garcia, Rachel Weinblatt, Alba Tuninetti, Sara Clopton, Rebecca McCue, and Kristin Vindler Michaelson, for help with participant recruitment, testing, and coding. As lab coordinator, Jane Park provided much appreciated feedback on the experimental design and stimuli for Chapter 3. The experiments in Chapter 3 would not have been possible without the support of John Trueswell and members of his lab, especially Katie McEldoon, Ann Bunger, and Alon Hafri, who helped us run our experiments at Philadelphia preschools. Members of the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania, especially John Trueswell, Delphine Dahan, Steve Isard, Lila Gleitman, and Mark Liberman, gave valuable feedback on experimental design. Abigail Cohn at Cornell University helped guide my thinking about the experimental results presented in Chapter 4. The corpus- phonetics project described in Chapter 5 would not have been possible without the advisorship of Jiahong Yuan and technical support from Kyle Gorman. Finally, deepest thanks to the children, parents, preschool administrators and teachers, and Penn undergraduates for their participation in this research. Funding was provided by NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and NSF IGERT Trainee Fellowship grants to C.Q., NSF grant HSD-0433567 to Delphine Dahan and Dan Swingley, and NIH grant R01- HD049681 to Dan Swingley. iv The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails all at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion. William James, The Principles of Psychology This was a most robust composition, a vigorous music that roused the senses and never stood still a moment. The boy perceived it as light touching various places in space, accumulating in intricate patterns. E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime One of my purposes was to listen, to hear speech, accent, speech rhythms, overtones and emphasis. For speech is so much more than words and sentences. John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America v ABSTRACT CHILDREN’S SENSITIVITY TO PITCH VARIATION IN LANGUAGE Carolyn Quam Daniel Swingley Children acquire consonant and vowel categories by 12 months, but take much longer to learn to interpret perceptible variation. This dissertation considers children’s interpretation of pitch variation. Pitch operates, often simultaneously, at different levels of linguistic structure. English-learning children must disregard pitch at the lexical level—since English is not a tone language—while still attending to pitch for its other functions. Chapters 1 and 5 outline the learning problem and suggest ways children might solve it. Chapter 2 demonstrates that 2.5-year-olds know pitch cannot differentiate words in English. Chapter 3 finds that not until age 4–5 do children correctly interpret pitch cues to emotions. Chapter 4 demonstrates some sensitivity between 2.5 and 5 years to the pitch cue to lexical stress, but continuing difficulties at the older ages. These findings suggest a late trajectory for interpretation of prosodic variation; throughout, I propose explanations for this protracted time-course. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATIONS.................................................................................................................iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS............................................................................................... iv ABSTRACT....................................................................................................................... vi LIST OF TABLES............................................................................................................. xi LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................... xii Chapter 1: Introduction—Contextualizing Pitch Within the Study of Phonological Development ....................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 The Amazing Pattern-Detecting Infant!............................................................... 2 1.2 Applying Distributional Learning to Form and Recognize Sound Categories .... 5 1.3 Speech Simultaneously Conveys Categories at Multiple Levels of Structure..... 8 1.4 Cue Weighting in Adults’ Category Learning: Mechanisms for Category Formation...................................................................................................................... 11 1.5 Cue Weighting in Adults’ Category Learning: Constraints on Learning........... 12 1.6 Cue Weighting in Children’s Category Learning .............................................. 16 1.7 Cue Differentiation and Integration in the Learning of Pitch Categories .......... 22 1.8 Overview of the Present Research ..................................................................... 24 Chapter 2: Phonological Knowledge Guides Two-year-olds’ and Adults’ Interpretation of Salient Pitch Contours in Word Learning..................................................................... 28 Abstract......................................................................................................................... 28 2.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................ 29 2.1.1 The Curious Case of Pitch Variation ......................................................... 32 2.1.2 Overview of the Two Experiments............................................................. 41 vii 2.2 Experiment 1 ...................................................................................................... 42 2.2.1 Method ........................................................................................................ 42 2.2.2 Results and Discussion ............................................................................... 49 2.3 Experiment 2 ...................................................................................................... 54 2.3.1
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