Research indicates that prosody plays an important role in aiding children's speech segmentation into relevant units such as words and clauses. Less well studied is whether prosodic cues also aid in determining the semantic meaning of an utterance. In these studies, I examine whether prosodic cues reliably direct children and adults to the correct referent of a novel word. Forty-two 4-year-olds (mean age 55.52 months) and forty-one adults (mean age 20.99 years) were shown pairs of pictures that varied along a single dimension (e.g., a big flower and a little flower). They then heard previously recorded utterances asking them to "Get the (novel word) one" spoken with prosody depicting one of the two meanings for each dimension. Half of the participants at each age were assigned to the Informative Instructions condition, in which they were instructed to attend to the "way the word is said" to infer the meaning of the word. The remaining participants, assigned to the No Instructions condition, were given no specific instructions to attend to prosody. Adults reliably determined the meaning of a novel word from the prosodic cues alone, regardless of the instructions. Four-year-olds failed to determine the meaning of a novel word from the prosodic cues even when given explicit instructions to attend to prosody. These studies reveal that adults more readily use prosody to constrain word meaning than young children. That 4-year-olds do not appear to spontaneously employ prosodic cues even when instructed to do so suggests that this is not a default strategy for young children. This implies that prosody may not guide early word learning as it does segmentation. Children may learn the prosodic correlates of word meaning over time through specific experience with prosody-meaning associations in their native language.
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