Pediatric development in prosodic information identification

Abstract

We studied pediatric ability to identify prosodic information. Subjects were 38 children aged 4 to 8 years and 6 adults who underwent pitch identification tests using word accent (“ame (candy)” and “ame (rain)”) and sentence intonation (statement and question). Materials were 6 synthetic speech stimuli, changing the F0 between 2 accent types. Conditions of time expansion and pitch increase were added to the test. Subjects were instructed to identify the pitch accent and choose between 2 pictures of test materials. One hearing-impaired child received same pitch identification test to apply to the test.
We found that (1) The ability to identify pitch accent in children developed at 4 to 8 years old. (2) Children identified word accent earlier than sentence intonation. (3) The identification of pitch accent was improved more by increasing word pitch than by time expansion. (4) The pitch identification test is applicable to hearing-impaired children.