Children's processing of prosodic cues for phrasal interpretation.

Using synthetic speech, word duration and fundamental frequency (F0) contours were parametrically manipulated to examine processes of phrasal interpretation by adult and child (5 and 7 years old) listeners. From an adult male voice, versions of the phrase "pink and green and white" were resynthesized to produce stimuli suggesting two possible interpretations: [(pink and green) and white] and [pink and (green and white)]. For each stimulus, listeners pointed to a picture to indicate which interpretation was intended. All subjects used duration and (to a lesser extent) intonation as perceptually salient cues for phrasal interpretation. The manner in which subjects processed this information was evaluated by comparing subjects' performance with the predictions of three different information processing models: a nonindependent cue-evaluation model, and two independent cue-evaluation models (an additive model, and the multiplicative, fuzzy logical model). Performance was best described by the fuzzy logical model, which assumes independent cue evaluation and generates a classification function characterized by cue trading relations. The results suggest that, similar to adults, children as young as 5 years of age rely on acoustic-prosodic information for syntactic phrase interpretation, and they process this information in an adultlike manner.