Ramachers, S. , Brouwer, S. , Gussenhoven, C. & Fikkert, P.
Radboud University, Nijmegen
The present study investigated the influence of pitch on word learning in children acquiring a restricted tone language (Limburgian) versus children acquiring an intonation language (Dutch). In Limburgian, primary stressed bimoraic syllables carry accent 1 (a fall) or accent 2 (a fall-rise), but only a small number of minimal pairs are distinguished solely by pitch. Pitch information is connected to a Limburgian speaker's knowledge of a word's pronunciation and assumed to be part of his/her mental representation. In Dutch, pitch is not contrastive at the word-level.
Twenty-three Limburgian and 35 Dutch 2,5-to-4-year-olds were trained on novel word-object pairings and subsequently tested on their word recognition of correct pronunciations (CP) and mispronunciations (MP) featuring a pitch change (cf. Quam & Swingley, 2010; Singh, Hui, Chan, & Golinkoff, 2013). Limburgian and Dutch children were expected to respond differently to the MP due to the different functions of pitch in their native language.
Our results show a significant main effect of condition (F(1,56)=8.53, p<.01) and a non-significant interaction between condition and language (p>.1), indicating that target fixations were higher in the CP than the MP condition for both groups. The findings are discussed in light of the influence of the native prosodic system.