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The Development of Children’s Processing of English Pitch Accents in a Visual Search Task

Bibyk, Sarah Alaine
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1275443086

Abstract Details

2010, Master of Arts, Ohio State University, Linguistics.
The purpose of this research was to determine when children become adult-like in their comprehension of English pitch accents. Previous research has established that children between the ages of 6 and 7 are able to comprehend the meaning difference between the L+H* pitch accent and the H* accent, but they do not appear to make use of the pitch accent information as quickly as adults when processing speech. An eyetracking study was conducted to investigate how 8 through 11 year old children process these pitch accents in comparison to adults and 6 to 7 year old children. For all of the age groups the presence of felicitous L+H* had a facilitative effect on fixations to the target item, but the 10 to 11 year old children showed unexpected delays in their fixations as compared to the 8 to 9 year old children and the adults. For all age groups, except for the 10 to 11 year old children, the presence of infelicitous L+H* created garden-pathed looks to a contrastive competitor. While this research does suggest that there is some development in the processing of pitch accents for children between the ages of 6 and 9, further research is required to account for the anomalous behavior of the 10 to 11 year old children.
Shari Speer, PhD (Advisor)
Laura Wagner, PhD (Committee Member)
Cynthia Clopper, PhD (Committee Member)
Kiwako Ito, PhD (Committee Member)
85 p.
Linguistics
sentence processing; prosody; pitch accent; contrastive accent; L+H*; eyetracking; development

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Bibyk, S. A. (2010). The Development of Children’s Processing of English Pitch Accents in a Visual Search Task [Master's thesis, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1275443086

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Bibyk, Sarah. The Development of Children’s Processing of English Pitch Accents in a Visual Search Task. 2010. Ohio State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1275443086.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Bibyk, Sarah. "The Development of Children’s Processing of English Pitch Accents in a Visual Search Task." Master's thesis, Ohio State University, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1275443086

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1275443086
528
© 2010, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.