Preschool-aged Children's Use of Prosody in Sentence Processing

Background & Objectives: The present study examined sentential conditions that affect preschool-aged children's ability to use prosody in sentence processing. Methods: In experiment 1, children were asked to respond to ambiguous questions, which can be disambiguated solely based on prosodic information, after listening to a series of stories that preceded the question. Experiment 2 examined whether the children can use prosody to determine sentence structures and meaning accordingly and compared the role of prosody in child parsing to that of morphological information, such as case markers, by presenting syntactically ambiguous sentences across three conditions: prosody-only, morphology-only, and prosody-morphology. This approach also allowed us to determine the unique contribution of prosody to child parsing above and beyond morphological information. Results: Children as young as 3 to 4 years of age were able to determine the target meaning of the ambiguous questions based on prosody in experiment 1, in which prosody was not relevant to sentence structure. By comparison, children as old as 6 years of age still showed some difficulty using prosody to determine sentence structure and meaning in which prosody was directly related to determining the structure of the target sentence in experiment 2. Experiment 2 also revealed that children performed better in prosody-morphology conditions than in morphology-only conditions, suggesting that prosody uniquely contributes to child parsing above and beyond morphological information. Discussion & Conclusion: We discussed both the specific conditions that seem to affect the child's use of prosody in child parsing and why such variations in using prosody might emerge as children develop a language.