Prosody, Accessibility, and Sentential Negation in Brazilian Portuguese

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Sketching: working through the medium

Bibliography: p. 126-12

The intonational phonology of Peninsular Spanish and European Portuguese

The study of Spanish and Portuguese intonation within the Autosegmental Metrical (AM) framework has developed substantially over the past 30 years, and recent applications of common methodology make comparative studies more feasible. Here we compare the intonational systems of Peninsular Spanish (PS) and European Portuguese (EP), considering previous research on prosodic hierarchy, phrasing and tonal density. Finally, we compare the two tonal inventories and their respective (ToBI) labeling conventions. We find a considerable amount of overlap in terms of phonetic implementations of the tonal categories, showing, at times, labeling differences. We use this comparative analysis (i) to discuss these labeling differences and (ii) to motivate the need for uniform but also transparent labeling conventions in order to account for variation across Ibero- Romance varieties and as the field moves forward, Romance varieties.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Prosody, Accessibility, and Sentential Negation in Brazilian Portuguese

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Developmental and cognitive aspects of children’s disbelief comprehension through intonation and facial gesture

This article investigates how children leverage intonational and gestural cues to an individual’s belief state through unimodal (intonation-only or facial gesture-only) and multimodal (intonation + facial gesture) cues. A total of 187 preschoolers (ages 3–5) participated in a disbelief comprehension task and were assessed for Theory of Mind (ToM) ability using a false belief task. Significant predictors included age, condition and success on the ToM task. Performance improved with age, and was significantly better for the multimodal condition compared to both unimodal conditions, suggesting that even though unimodal cues were useful to children, the presence of reinforcing information for the multimodal condition was more effective for detecting disbelief. However, results also point to the development of intonational and gestural comprehension in tandem. Children that passed the ToM task significantly outperformed those that failed it for all conditions, showing that children who can attribute a false belief to another individual may more readily access these intonational and gestural cues

Developmental and cognitive aspects of children's disbelief comprehension through intonation and facial gesture

We investigate how children leverage intonational and gestural cues to an individual's belief state through unimodal (intonation-only or facial gestureonly) and multimodal (intonation + facial gesture) cues. A total of 187 preschoolers (ages 3-5) participated in a disbelief comprehension task and were assessed for Theory of Mind (ToM) ability using a false belief task. Significant predictors included Age, Condition and success on the ToM task. Performance improved with age, and was significantly better for the multimodal condition compared to both unimodal conditions, suggesting that even though unimodal cues were useful to children, the presence of reinforcing information for the multimodal condition was more effective for detecting disbelief. However, results also point to the development of intonational and gestural comprehension in tandem. Children that passed the ToM task significantly outperformed those that failed it for all conditions, showing that children who can attribute a false belief to another individual may more readily access these intonational and gestural cues

Children's processing of morphosyntactic and prosodic cues in overriding context-based hypotheses: an eye tracking study

This research explores children's ability to integrate contextual and linguistic cues. Prior work has shown that children are not able to weigh contextual information in an adult-like way and that between the age of 4 and 6 they show difficulties in revising a hypothesis they have made based on early-arriving linguistic information in sentence processing. Therefore we considered children's ability to confirm or override a context-based hypothesis based on linguistic information. Our objective in this study was to test (1) children's (ages 4-6) ability to form a hypothesis based on contextual information, (2) their ability to override such a hypothesis based on linguistic information and (3) how children are able to use different types of linguistic cues (morphosyntactic versus prosodic) to confirm or override the initial hypothesis. Results from both offline (pointing) and online (eye tracking) tasks suggest that children in this age group indeed form hypotheses based on contextual information. Age effects were found regarding children's ability to override these hypotheses. Overall, 4-year-olds were not shown to be able to override their hypotheses using linguistic information of interest. For 5- and 6-year-olds, it depended on the types of linguistic cues that were available to them. Children were better at using morphosyntactic cues to override an initial hypothesis than they were at using prosodic cues to do so. Our results suggest that children slowly develop the ability to override hypotheses based on early-arriving information, even when that information is extralinguistic and contextual. Children must learn to weight different types of cues in an adult-like way. This developmental period of learning to prioritize different cues in an adult-like way is consistent with a constraint-based model of learning