Newborns discriminate the rhythm of multisyllabic stressed words.

Alessandra Sansavini · Josiane Bertoncini · Giuliana Giovanelli

203 citations0/0 files storedDevelopmental Psychology

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Phonetics and Phonology Research Language Development and Disorders Neuroscience and Music Perception

Abstract

Three experiments were run to test whether newborns were able to discriminate different stress patterns in multisyllabic stressed Italian words that varied both in consonants and in number of syllables. A high-amplitude sucking procedure was adopted in which the experimental group heard 2 sets of stimuli alternating minute by minute, whereas the control group heard only a single set of stimuli. The results showed that stress patterns were discriminated in 2 disyllabic phonetically unvaried words (Experiment 1), in 2 trisyliabic consonant-varied words (Experiment 2), and in 2 sets of disyllabic words varied in consonants within and between words (Experiment 3). The alternation procedure proved to be suitable for examining newborns abilities of discrimination and categorization. It also lowered the participants rejection rate compared with the classic habituation procedure. The present results suggest that newborns are sensitive to words' rhythm, as carried by stress patterns, and that this prosodic information is salient even in the presence of substantial consonant variation.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 203 citations exist upstream.

References

2009Language Acquisition: The State of the Art 1988A precursor of language acquisition in young infants 1985Four-month-old infants prefer to listen to motherese 1993Infants' Preference for the Predominant Stress Patterns of English Words 1985The Units of Language Acquisition 1993Two-day-olds prefer their native language 1993Infants′ Sensitivity to the Sound Patterns of Native Language Words 1990Preference for Infant-Directed Speech in the First Month after Birth

Cited by

1998Discrimination of pitch contours by neonates 2006An interaction between prosody and statistics in the segmentation of fluent speech 2008Impact of language on development of auditory‐visual speech perception 2003Prosodic structure and syntactic acquisition: the case of the head‐direction parameter 2016Prosodic grouping at birth 2013Perceptual narrowing in the context of increased variation: Insights from bilingual infants

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.