Development of the ability to analyze and understand utterances including words and prosody

2016 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 25285183
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B)
• Allocation Type: Partial Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Educational psychology
• Research Institution: The University of Tokyo
• Principal Investigator: Haryu Etsuko 東京大学, 教育学研究科(研究院), 教授 (70276004)
• Project Period (FY): 2013-04-01 – 2017-03-31
• Keywords: 言語 / 発話 / 乳幼児 / 単語学習 / 助詞 / アクセント / 感情抑揚 / 統語分類

Outline of Final Research Achievements

To learn a language, children need to attend to linguistic aspects of an utterance such as words, phrases and sentences and ignore temporal change patterns of pitch and intensity (word prosody or sentential intonation pattern), which are used to discriminate between words in some languages including Japanese and sometimes convey speaker’s affect more precisely than lexical contents. The present research aimed to reveal (1) when and with what cues Japanese infants begin to discriminate a word (object label) that should be associated with a referent object from other types of speech sound, and (2) developmental trajectory in which Japanese children use pitch pattern information of words and sentences to recognize word meanings and speaker affect.

Free Research Field

発達心理学