title: Prosody signals the emergence of intentional communication in the first year of life: evidence from Catalan-babbling infants.
abstract: There is considerable debate about whether early vocalizations mimic the target language and whether prosody signals emergent intentional communication. A longitudinal corpus of four Catalan-babbling infants was analyzed to investigate whether children use different prosodic patterns to distinguish communicative from investigative vocalizations and to express intentionality. A total of 2,701 vocalizations from 0;7 to 0;11 were coded acoustically (by marking pitch range and duration), gesturally, and pragmatically (by marking communicative status and specific pragmatic function). The results showed that communicative vocalizations were shorter and had a wider pitch range than investigative vocalizations and that these patterns in communicative vocalizations depended on the intention of the vocalizations: requests and expressions of discontent displayed wider pitch range and longer duration than responses or statements. These results support the hypothesis that babbling children can successfully use a set of prosodic patterns to signal intentional speech.
authors.affiliation: Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain.
authors.forename: Núria
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Esteve-Gibert
authors.forename: Pilar
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Prieto
mesh_terms: D002663:Child Language; D003142:Communication; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D033182:Intention; D008137:Longitudinal Studies; D008297:Male; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013068:Speech Production Measurement