Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-p566r Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T14:24:23.014Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Maternal pitch height in ordinary and play situations*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Nadja Reissland*
Affiliation:
University of Nottingham
David Snow
Affiliation:
University of Arizona
*
Address for correspondence: Department of Psychology, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, England.

Abstract

Ten children at mean ages of o; 11.3 and o; 15.3 and their monolingual German-speaking mothers were audio- and videotaped in their homes while having a meal with a spoon (ordinary situation) and while feeding a doll with a spoon (play situation). Sentences spoken by the mothers that were comparable in length and sentence type across situations were analysed acoustically. In both data-collection sessions, it was found that the mothers spoke with the same mean amplitude in the two situations but they used higher mean fundamental frequency when speaking during the play situation than during the ordinary situation. In the first data-collection session, when the infants did not yet use meaningful words or engage in pretend play, the mothers also used a wider pitch range in the play situation than in the ordinary situation. It is concluded that mothers use both pitch height and pitch range to introduce the preverbal infant to the difference between non-play and play situations, and they continue to use variations in pitch height to mark the same distinction after the children have become active participants in pretend play activities. Implications of the results are discussed in terms of possible longitudinal patterns associated with mothers' use of intonational key and register.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

This paper is dedicated to Prof. R. Burghart, with whom the first author had discussed the ideas, but who died of brain cancer before its completion. We thank Dr P. L. Harris for commenting on a draft of this paper, Ludwig Michel for collecting the data and Tracy Hamilton for serving as an independent judge and we thank three referees for their criticism.

References

REFERENCES

Bates, E. (1979). Language and context: the acquisition of pragmatics. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Bolinger, D. (1989). Intonation and its uses: melody in grammar and discourse. London: Edward Arnold.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clarkson, M. G. (1992). Infants' perception of low pitch. In Werner, L. A. & Rubel, E. W. (eds), Developmental psychoacoustics. Washington: APA.Google Scholar
Cruttenden, A. (1986). Intonation. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Cruttenden, A. (1994). Phonetic and prosodic aspects of baby talk. In Gallaway, C. & Richards, B. J. (eds), Input and interaction in language acquisition. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Fein, G. & Apfel, N. (1979). Some preliminary observations on knowing and pretending. In Smith, N. R. & Franklin, M. B. (eds), Symbolic functioning in childhood. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Fenson, L. & Ramsay, D. (1980). Decentration and integration of the child's play in the second year. Child Development 51, 171–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fernald, A. & Kuhl, P. K. (1987). Acoustic determinants of infant preference for motherese speech. Infant Behaviour and Development 10, 279–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gallaway, C. & Richards, B. J. (1994). Input and interaction in language acquisition. Cambridge: C.U.P.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lehiste, I. (1970). Suprasegmentals. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.Google Scholar
Nelson, K. E., Bonvillian, J., Denninger, M., Kaplan, B. & Baker, N. (1984). Maternal input adjustments and nonadjustments as related to the children's linguistic advances and to language acquisition theories. In Pellegrini, A. & Yawkey, T. (eds), The development of oral and written languages in social contexts. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Nicolich, L. (1977). Beyond seonsori-motor intelligence: assessment of symbolic maturity through analysis of pretend play. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 23, 8999.Google Scholar
Papousek, M. (1992). Early ontogeny of vocal communication in parent-infant interactions. In Papousek, H., Jürgens, U. & Papousek, M. (eds), Nonverbal and vocal communication, Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Pine, J. (1992). Maternal style at the early one-word stage: reevaluating the stereotype of the directive mother. First Language 12, 169–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shatz, M. (1982). On mechanisms of language acquisition: can features of the communicative environment account for development. In Wanner, E. & Gleitmann, L. R. (eds), Language acquisition: the state of the art. New York: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Snow, C. E. (1994). Beginning from baby talk: twenty years of research on input in interaction. In Gallaway, C. & Richards, B. J. (eds), Input and interaction in language acquisition. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Snow, C. E. & Goldfield, B. A. (1983). turn the page please: situation specific language acquisition. Journal of Child Language 10, 551–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Snow, C. E., Perlmann, R. & Nathan, D. (1987). why routines are different: towards a multiple-factors model of the relation between input and language acquisition. In Nelson, K. E. & van Kleeck, A. (eds), Children's language, vol. 6. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar