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Early intonational development in Spanish: A case study

Abstract:

This study investigates early intonational development in one Spanish child from Gijón, Spain, between the ages of 11 and 28 months, focusing on the capacity to use appropriate intonation for specific pragmatic meanings. The aim of the study is twofold. First, the article aims to describe the development of different intonation patterns and pragmatic meanings at different stages and to assess whether the first intonation contours produced by the child reflect the language-specific prosodic properties of the input language. The second goal of our longitudinal study is to assess whether the mastery of certain intonation patterns correlate with grammatical and lexical development. This study is part of a larger project that investigates the intonational patterns produced by 2 Spanish-speaking children and 4 Catalan-speaking children (Prieto, Estrella, Thorson & Vanrell in press). Recent studies on prosodic development have claimed that substantial advances in the acquisition of intonation co-occur with more general changes in grammatical development (Snow 2000, Snow 2006, Snow & Balog 2002). As Snow (2006: 294) points out,“the milestone event in children’s acquisition of expressive syntax is the appearance of two-word combinations at about 18 months old, which coincides exactly with the dramatic growth in intonation that was observed in this and other studies.” Yet some recent findings seem to contradict this hypothesis. For example, Prieto and Vanrell (2007) reported that Catalan children’s emerging intonation is not synchronous with grammatical development and the start of two-word combinations. The four children analyzed in that study …