Infants’ Perception of the Intonation of Broad and Narrow Focus

Abstract

Infants perceive intonation contrasts early in development in contrast to lexical stress but similarly to lexical pitch accent. Previous studies have mostly focused on pitch height/direction contrasts; however, languages use a variety of pitch features to signal meaning, including differences in pitch timing. In this study, we investigate infants’ perception of the prosodic contrast that cues the difference between all-new information (broad focus) and the highlighting of a particular word (narrow/contrastive focus) in European Portuguese (EP), and which has been described as having pitch timing as its key feature. Using a modified version of the visual habituation paradigm, EP learning infants discriminated this contrast at 12 months but not at 7 months, deviating from previous findings of a precocious ability to perceive pitch distinctions. These results suggest different developmental trajectories of the perception of different prosodic contrasts, underlining the importance of the nature of the cues signalling a given contrast in a given language.