Sound to structure: development of prosodic phrasing before birth and in the first year of life

Newborn babies are faced with an interesting challenge: learning their native language. This is not an easy task. A newborn does not yet know the words that it hears, let alone their combined meanings. Instead, the child hears a continuous stream of speech sounds. One of the first steps the child can take to achieve the goal of learning language, is to break down this continuous flow into large distinct units, such as sentences and phrases. Luckily, the rhythm and melody of a language (= ‘prosody’) can help the child to split speech into these units. Specifically, the boundaries of each unit (such as the end of a sentence) are indicated in spoken language by certain acoustic cues, such as pauses or intonation changes. Unfortunately however, the importance of each of these cues varies between different languages. Therefore, a child needs to learn what cues are important in the specific language it hears in order to break down and start learning the language.

In this project we investigate the development of the ability to break down speech into units based on rhythmic and melodic cues, i.e. ‘prosodic phrasing’.