Developmental linguistics

Speaker: Mits Ota (University of Edinburgh)

Work with Naoto Yamane (RIKEN Brain Science Institute) and Reiko Mazuka (Duke University & RIKEN BSI)

Title: The effects of pitch contours on infant word recognition in Japanese

Abstract: Both infant learners of lexical tone languages (e.g., Mandarin) and non-tone languages (e.g., English) show a tendency to treat pitch patterns as lexically contrastive up to about 14 months. In this study, we examined if this early-developing capacity to lexically-encode pitch variations enables infants to acquire a pitch accent system, in which pitch-based lexical contrasts are obscured by the interaction of lexical and nonlexical (i.e., intonational) features. Eighteen 17-month-olds learning Tokyo Japanese were tested on their recognition of familiar words with the expected pitch pattern or with the lexically opposite pitch pattern. In early trials, infants were faster in shifting their eyegaze from the distractor object to the target object than in shifting from the target to object in the pitch-matched condition. In later trials, however, infants showed faster distractor-to-target than target-to-distractor shifts in both the pitch-matched and pitch-mismatched conditions. These results indicate that, in a pitch-accent system, the ability to use pitch variations to recognize words is still in a nascent state at 17 months. We discuss the implications of this finding for the general trajectory of development in pitch phonology.

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Laura Lindsay