Auditory perception acquisition of prosodic phrasing

• Grant number: 25/00276-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate (Direct)
• Start date: July 01, 2025
• End date: February 28, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Geovana Carina Neris Soncin Santos
• Grantee: Gabriela Aparecida Rodrigues Gonçalves
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia e Ciências (FFC). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Marília. Marília , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 20/10144-3 - Prosody production and perception in children with typical and atypical phonological development, AP.JP

Abstract

Assuming prosody is responsible for characterizing the rhythmic and melodic aspects of a language (Ladd, 2004) and, thus, composing its phonological structure (Nespor and Vogel, 1986; Selkirk, 1984), it becomes essential to address it from a theoretical phonological perspective, beyond its phonetic-acoustic aspects. However, there is a noticeable lack of studies from this perspective on Brazilian Portuguese (BP) in speech therapy studies, especially those addressing phonological acquisition and deviant acquisition processes. For these reasons, and considering the central role that speech perception plays in the acquisition process, this project proposes to describe the auditory-perceptual performance of children regarding the identification and interpretation of prosodic segmentation at the post-lexical level, and to identify if there would be any phonetic cues that would favor such perception. To this end, a sample of speech perception data will be collected from children and adolescents with typical language development, involving at least 75 subjects, organized into different age groups. Participants will be exposed to auditory stimuli derived from ambiguous sentences differentiated by the presence or absence of an intonational phrase boundary in two distinct experiments to investigate the auditory perception of prosodic segmentation. These stimuli were recorded and acoustically processed so that the acoustic cues characterizing the prosodic boundary - namely durational increase, presence of a pause, and descending intonation contour - were manipulated to create a gradient continuum of stimuli characterized by different combinations of intonational phrase boundary marking cues. During the first experiment, participants will identify the intonational phrase boundary and evaluate its strength by assigning scores to each stimulus. In the second experiment, participants will semantically interpret the presented stimuli. Regarding the results, it is hypothesized that perceptual accuracy differences will be found between age groups. It is expected that younger age groups will possibly show lower perceptual accuracy compared to older age groups in distinguishing prosodic segmentation possibilities with or without the prosodic boundary, as well as in the semantic interpretation of these segmentation possibilities. It is also hypothesized that, for different segmentation perception tasks, younger children will rely on non-standard cues for BP, unlike older children/adolescents, who will anchor on standard cues for characterizing the intonational phrase boundary for BP. The results obtained may provide unprecedented insights into the understanding of the acquisition milestones of prosodic segmentation in children and adolescents with typical language acquisition, directly contributing to linguistic and speech therapy studies since, from typical development, new studies with atypical populations can also outline deviant acquisition. (AU)