Lexicosyntactic and intonational cues in turn projection by Dutch and English Toddlers: An eye-tracking study
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2014-07-22
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en
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Successful coordination during conversation requires adult speakers to predict upcoming turn transitions with lexicosyntactic, prosodie, and non-verbal information. Infants process prosodie information from early on for speech segmentation and emotion recognition, but only learn about lexicosyntactic rules between their second and third year of life. Suprinsingly, previous studies looking at the interplay between prosodie and semantic cues in turn prediction have not found an early primacy of prosodie cues. However these studies used phonetic manipulation, such as filtered "under water" speech, to control the availability of linguistic cues. Here we pitted intonational cues against lexicosyntactic ones in unfiltered and thus natural-sounding conversation. To examine the generality of our findings, we tested two linguistic populations (Dutch and British-English). We tracked the anticipatory eye-movements of 14 Dutch and 21 English two-yearÂolds, and 16 Dutch and 20 English adult controls as they watched videos of dyadic puppet conversation. Each target sentence was controlled for lexicosyntactic and intonational cues to turn completion (incomplete=hold and complete=yield), resulting in four types of target sentences (ful/y incomplete, incomplete syntax, incomplete intonation, and ful/y complete). Cues conflicted in two conditions (incomplete syntax and incomplete intonation) to test for their relative primacy. We found that Dutch and English toddlers and adults used both lexicosyntactic and intonational cues in their anticipation of upcoming speaker changes, but weighted lexicosyntactic cues over intonational ones when the cues are pitted against each other. We found no overall differences in the use of lexicosyntactic and intonational cues for turn-projection between the two languages, but within-condition differences were found. These results raise new questions regarding the developmental interaction of lexicosyntactic and intonational cues with pragmatic ones in conversational predictive processing.
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Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen