Chapter 5. The role of prosody in early speech segmentation and word-referent mapping

Maria Teixidó (1) , Clément François (1, 2, 3) , Laura Bosch (1, 3, 4) , Claudia Männel (5)

1 Department of Cognition, Development and Educational Psychology, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
2 Cognition and Brain Plasticity Group [Barcelona, Spain]
3 Institut de Recerca Pediàtrica Hospital Sant Joan de Déu [Barcelona, Spain]
4 Institut de Neurociències
5 IMPNSC - Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences [Leipzig]

This chapter reviews electrophysiological studies on early word-form segmentation and word-referent mapping, with a focus on the role of prosody in these early abilities closely related to vocabulary acquisition. First, we will review event-related brain potential (ERP) studies on word segmentation showing the impact of lexical stress cues, infant-directed speech (IDS) properties and melodic information on word-form extraction. Then, we will review research on word-referent mapping, revealing the scarcity of ERP studies specifically exploring the contribution of prosody in this domain. Throughout the chapter we will emphasize how electrophysiological methods offer a more fine-grained perspective of the brain processes supporting segmentation and mapping abilities, often revealing infants’ sensitivities to auditory input before overt responses from behavioral methods can be obtained.

Domaines: Neurosciences; Psychologie; Linguistique

Maria Teixidó, Clément François, Laura Bosch, Claudia Männel. Chapter 5. The role of prosody in early speech segmentation and word-referent mapping. Edited by Pilar Prieto and Núria Esteve-Gibert. The Development of Prosody in First Language Acquisition, pp.79 - 100, 2018, ⟨10.1075/tilar.23.05tei⟩. ⟨hal-03053945⟩