Children's Intonation E-Book

Bill Wells

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 692

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Children’s Intonation is a practical guide that focuses on the nature, causes and assessment of intonation problems for children and adolescents. Highlighting the importance of intonation for everyday conversational interaction and the implications of this for teaching and therapy contexts, this book addresses the following questions:

• How and when do children learn to use intonation for the purposes of interaction? 
• As children get older, does intonation become more important or less important for communication?
• How might intonation be used to support or compensate for other aspects of language?
• What are the implications for practitioners, parents and caregivers when interacting with young children?

Clinically oriented, this book explores these questions through case studies that cover a range of developmental communication difficulties including autism spectrum disorders, hearing impairment and specific speech and language difficulties.   It provides readers with a tool for profiling children’s intonation skills, a developmental phase model to explain typical and atypical intonation development, a psycholinguistic model of intonation processing, interactional perspectives on intonation use, and consideration of intonation in relation to both written and spoken language. It also includes acccess to a companion website with extra resources.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Foreword

Preface

How this book is organized

Pointers for the future

Acknowledgements

About the companion website

CHAPTER 1: Intonation

The phonetic approach

The prosodic transcription

The linguistic approach

English intonation: a brief introduction

Stress and rhythm

Word stress

Rhythm

The Foot

Rhythm and grammar

Intonation and meaning

Key to Activity 1.1

Key to Activity 1.2

Key to Activity 1.3

CHAPTER 2: Turns

Turn constructional units

The Intonation Phrase: a system of traffic lightsfor turn-taking

Gaining and giving away the floor

Holding the floor

Overlap and turn-taking

Collaboration and competition in overlapping talk

Competition

Summary

Key to Activity 2.1

Key to Activity 2.2

Key to Activity 2.3

CHAPTER 3: Focus

Focus and Tonic placement

Turn-final Tonic and Focus

Learning to (De)Focus

Focus and Tonic placement in atypical intonation development

Summary

Key to Activity 3.1

Key to Activity 3.2

Key to Activity 3.3

CHAPTER 4: Actions

Repetition and Tone matching

Tone non-matching to initiate repair

Tone matching in interactions with children who have communication difficulties

Notation for Tone matching and non-matching

Tones and questions

Tones, words and non-verbal acts: progressing the talk

Summary

Key to Activity 4.1

Key to Activity 4.2

CHAPTER 5: The Intonation in Interaction Profile (IIP)

Recording

Transcription

Analysis

Profiling

Using the IIP in a case of atypical intonation

Turn-taking

Focus

Actions

Summary

Key to Activity 5.1

Key to Activity 5.2

Key to Activity 5.3

CHAPTER 6: Infancy

Perception of intonation features

Infant-directed speech (IDS)

Tone or non-Tone language?

Intonation in infant interactions

Turn-taking

Focus

Alignment, initiation and matching

Production of prosodic features

Summary

Key to Activity 6.1

Key to Activity 6.2

CHAPTER 7: Preschool years

Tone matching and alignment in the early preschool period

Later developments in the phonetic realization of Tones

Turn construction and expansion of the Intonation Phrase

Treading on your Tail: Post-Tonic expansion of the IP

Getting a Head: Pre-Tonic expansion of the IP

Overlap and intonation in the preschool period

Later developments in Intonation Phrase and turn construction

Focus and Tonic placement

Later developments in Tonic placement and Focus

Summary

Key to Activity 7.1

CHAPTER 8: School years

Intonation and peer interaction

Focus

Turns

Actions

Intonation, growth and identity

Testing intonation in the school years

Testing intonation in the school years: what does it tell us?

Intonation and reading aloud

How do children use intonation when reading aloud?

Summary

Key to Activity 8.1

Key to Activity 8.2

CHAPTER 9: Models

Developmental phase model for intonation

Maturation

Input

Language

Interactional Processing Model for Intonation

Action formulation and Tone selection

Focus choice and Tonic placement

Turn construction, syntax and Intonation Phrase structure and syntax

Motor planning and Foot structure

Motor execution

Summary

CHAPTER 10: Speech, language and literacy impairments

Speech output impairments

Specific speech difficulty

Childhood apraxia of speech

Zoe: a case of severe and persisting speech difficulties

Intonation production of children with language impairments

Children with speech and language impairment: using the PEPS-C battery

Literacy impairments and dyslexia

Summary

Key to Activity 10.1

Key to Activity 10.2

CHAPTER 11: Autism spectrum disorders and learning difficulties

Intonation and the autism spectrum

Kevin

Delayed echoes from developmental and interactional perspectives

High-functioning autism

Sammy: a child with High Functioning Autism

Williams syndrome

Down syndrome

Summary

CHAPTER 12: Hearing impairment and cochlear implants

Intonation in interactions with deaf children

Phonological analysis of intonation in deaf children’s speech

Cochlear implantation

Auditory neuropathy/dys-synchrony spectrum disorder

Case study: Ricky

Summary

Key to Activity 12.1

Key to Activity 12.2

References

APPENDIX 1 Transcription conventions and symbols

General conventions

Intonation notation for reading transcriptions (English)

Phonological notation

APPENDIX 2 Background to the recordings of Robin and his mother

APPENDIX 3 The Intonation In Interaction Profile (IIP): Proforma

APPENDIX 4 The Developmental Phase Model

APPENDIX 5 The Intonation Processing Model

APPENDIX 6 The Intonation In Interaction Profile: Mick

APPENDIX 7 The Intonation In Interaction Profile: Jacob

APPENDIX 8 Phonetic transcript: Ricky

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Tables

Chapter 01

Table 1.1 Diacritic notation for Tones in English intonation, as used in reading transcriptions in this book.

Table 1.2 Examples of English lexical stress patterns.

Chapter 06

Table 6.1 Nigel’s fixed Tone patterns (adapted from Halliday, 2003).

Table 6.2 Mapping of pitch contour (Tone) and height onto Halliday’s functions (adapted from Table 10.3 in Vonwiller, 1988).

Table 6.3 Summary of intonation-related capacities and behaviours evident from 0–18 months.

Chapter 07

Table 7.1 Distribution of Sophie’s Tonics by position in the IP (based on Fletcher, 1985).

Table 7.2 Summary of intonation related capacities and behaviours in the preschool years.

Chapter 08

Table 8.1 Brief description of PEPS-C Function tasks.

Table 8.2 Summary of intonation-related capacities and behaviours in the school years.

Chapter 09

Table 9.1 Developmental phase model of intonation.

Chapter 10

Table 10.1 Mapping the criteria of Shriberg et al. (1990) for “inappropriate phrasal stress” onto the English intonation system and its interactional functions.

Table 10.2 G.G.’s production of singular and plural forms of monosyllabic nouns (adapted from Camarata & Gandour, 1985).

Table 10.3 Malcolm’s PEPS-C profile.

Table 10.4 Robin’s PEPS-C profile.

Table 10.5 Jonathan’s PEPS-C profile.

Chapter 12

Table 12.1 Examples of experimental stimuli used by O’Halpin (adapted from O’Halpin, 2010, Table 3.1).

List of Illustrations

Chapter 01

Figure 1.1 Acoustic analysis of Beth’s turn from Activity 1.1 (Extract (1.3).

Figure 1.2 Acoustic analysis of Daisy’s turn from Activity 1.1 (Extract (1.2)).

Chapter 05

Figure 5.1 Partially completed IIP based on Extract (5.3.4).

Chapter 08

Figure 8.1 Extract from the reading passage

A Trip to the Zoo.

Chapter 09

Figure 9.1 Intonation processing model.

Figure 9.2 Intonation processing model for lines 2 and 3 of Extract (9.1).

Chapter 10

Figure 10.1 Intonation Processing Model: Jonathan.

Chapter 11

Figure 11.1 Psycholinguistic processing of an immediate echo.

Figure 11.2 Psycholinguistic processing of a delayed echo.

Chapter 12

Figure 12.1 Intonation processing model for Ricky: line 62.

Appendix 5

Figure A5.1 The Intonation Processing Model. (Intonation components are in

italics.

)

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

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The ‘Children’s Speech and Literacy Difficulties’ series

Other books in the series:

Children’s Speech and Literacy Difficulties: A Psycholinguistic Framework, Book 1ISBN: 978-1-86156-030-8

Children’s Speech and Literacy Difficulties: Identification and Intervention, Book 2ISBN: 978-1-86156-131-2

Persisting Speech Difficulties in Children: Children’s Speech and Literacy Difficulties, Book 3ISBN: 978-0-470-02744-8

Compendium of Auditory and Speech Tasks: Children’s Speech and Literacy Difficulties, Book 4ISBN: 978-0-470-51659-1

For more information on any of these titles, visit www.wiley.com

Children's Intonation

A Framework for Practice and Research

Bill Wells and Joy Stackhouse

Department of Human Communication SciencesUniversity of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

This edition first published 2016 © 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wells, Bill (Clinical linguistics) Children’s intonation : a framework for practice and research / Bill Wells, Professor, Department of Human Communication Sciences University of Sheffield, Joy Stackhouse, Professor, Department of Human Communication Sciences, University of Sheffield.  pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index.

 ISBN 978-1-118-94762-3 (paperback)1. Language disorders in children. 2. Linguistics. 3. Children–Language. 4. Prosodic analysis (Linguistics) I. Stackhouse, Joy. II. Title. RJ496.L35W45 2016 618.92′855–dc23

     2015024893

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Cover image: GettyImages-536053013/skynesher

Foreword

Intonation is one of the crucial linguistic resources that children need to be able to communicate effectively. The natural home of intonation is spontaneous everyday interaction. Intonation and prosodic features generally play a key role in shaping the meaning of what is said, how it is said and how conversational interaction works. They shape the flow of turns at talk and help configure both the actions those turns perform and the topics being talked about.

Children's Intonation: A Framework for Practice and Research, by Bill Wells and Joy Stackhouse, presents an exciting, interactionally-driven approach to understanding how children develop intonation and exploit it in their speech. Through a series of detailed case studies and practical analytic exercises, the authors show how it is possible to profile children’s intonational behaviour based on a careful consideration of talk in interaction. There are two key elements to this approach:

the need to examine the location of particular intonation patterns in their sequential context, in order to understand how the pattern that a speaker uses is influenced by the previous speaker’s pattern;

the need to demonstrate the meaning of intonational and prosodic features with reference to the observable behaviour of other participants in the interaction itself rather than relying on the researcher’s or the clinician’s own intuitions.

This methodology, developed from the discipline of Conversation Analysis, has a number of advantages over other approaches. It enables practitioners and researchers to study the intonational behaviour of any child in any interactional setting, irrespective of whether they are deemed to be typical or atypical in their linguistic development. Because the focus of analysis is on turns and sequences of talk, all aspects of a given turn, including its lexical and syntactic characteristics, can be examined, integrated and taken into account. Moreover, because the interactional analysis makes no assumptions as to whether ‘unusual’ prosody reflects an underlying problem or processing deficit, it also enables the identification of individual children’s practices and any compensatory mechanisms they may deploy.

Everyday conversational interaction is the basic, fundamental environment for children’s development, use and learning of ordinary language. The sophisticated interactional approach to prosodic features advocated by Wells and Stackhouse in this book provides an important tool for therapists and researchers. It will enable them to develop a more nuanced appreciation of intonational form and function in both typically and atypically developing children, including children with speech, language or hearing impairments and those on the autistic spectrum. It will also significantly enhance the ability of therapists and researchers to give a robust account of both the functional aspects of intonation and the cognitive processes involved in its production and understanding. The models of intonational profiling and psycholinguistic processing that are proposed should moreover permit the development of effective and sensitive strategies for intervention.

This excellent book should be in the hands of anyone who is interested in how children learn to communicate through conversational interaction.

John LocalEmeritus Professor of Phonetics and LinguisticsDepartment of Language and Linguistic ScienceUniversity of York, UK

Preface

Every time we speak, we have to do something with the pitch, loudness and length of our utterances – the prosodic features of speech which combine in patterns of rhythm and intonation. This is as true of the infant taking his or her first vocal turns with a caregiver, as it is of a caregiver interacting with an infant, or of an adult talking to other adults. Nevertheless, compared with other aspects of speech and language development, intonation has received less attention and is rarely seen as a priority for developmental research or for speech and language therapy assessment and intervention. There are several possible reasons for this.

Intonation is easy for children

. Relatively few children seem to have problems learning to use intonation patterns. If this is so, the case for studying its development is less obvious compared with other areas of spoken language, such as consonant production or inflectional morphology, which are known to be affected by developmental problems.

Intonation is hard to learn about

. Even though as native speakers most of us have no problems in using intonation patterns effectively in our everyday lives, students of child language development, including speech and language pathology students, come to their studies with little explicit awareness of intonation. Students frequently report difficulties in identifying and labelling these patterns in an academic context.

Intonation is hard to read about

. Writing systems generally focus on words and their organization into sentences. Western orthographies focus on consonants and vowels, largely ignoring prosodic features. In order to understand a book about intonation, the reader therefore needs to invest some effort in learning a new notation and terminology.

We think that there are nevertheless good reasons to study children’s intonation. Our broad aim is to highlight the importance of intonation for everyday conversational interaction and the implications of this for teaching and therapy contexts. We do this by addressing questions such as the following:

If the intonation of the mother tongue really is relatively easy to learn for the vast majority of children, what is it that makes it easier than other aspects of language?

How and when do children learn to use intonation for the purposes of interaction?

As children get older, does intonation become more important or less important for communication?

Some children with developmental difficulties present with unusual intonation. What form can this take? Why might it occur?

Other children, whose intonation does not sound atypical, have difficulties in understanding the meanings that others are trying to convey through intonation. How can we identify such problems?

If intonation is a relative strength for most children with developmental speech and language difficulties, how might intonation be used to support or compensate for other aspects of language?

Given the importance of intonation in spoken communication, what are the implications for practitioners, parents and caregivers when interacting with young children, particularly children who have speech, language and communication needs?

In order to answer these questions, we have adopted a similar approach to previous books in our series on Children’s Speech and Literacy Difficulties. This book shares the same basic orientation towards clinical application and includes:

a tool for profiling children’s intonation skills;

a developmental phase model to explain typical and atypical intonation development;

a psycholinguistic model of intonation processing;

an interactional perspective on intonation use;

consideration of intonation in relation to both written and spoken language;

case studies to illustrate key points and clinical application;

activities for the reader to complete with keys to check answers.

How this book is organized

Following an introduction to the study of English intonation in Chapter 1, Chapters 2–4 present a way to approach the assessment of a child’s intonation from a functional perspective, in order to find out whether the child is able to communicate and understand the meanings that intonation conveys in conversation. The material that informs this approach is naturally occurring talk, including talk that occurs in typical play activities. The essential points of these chapters are synthesized in Chapter 5 in the Intonation in Interaction Profile (IIP), a tool for assessing children’s intonation through analysis of recorded conversation. These first five chapters are intended to be accessible to anyone interested in intonation from an interactional perspective, and not only those with developmental interests. The emphasis is on the role of intonation systems in handling transitions in conversational interaction, notably transitions between speakers through turn-taking, transitions between topics and transitions between social actions.

In Chapters 6–8 this framework provides the theoretical basis for evaluating and synthesizing research into the development of intonation from birth through to the school years. In Chapter 9, developmental and processing models of intonation are described that incorporate interactional and psycholinguistic perspectives. In the final three chapters (Chapters 10–12), research into the intonation of children with developmental difficulties is described and our assessment approach is illustrated through case studies. In Chapter 10, the focus is on children with speech, language and literacy difficulties. In Chapter 11, we consider children with autism spectrum disorders, Williams syndrome and Down syndrome. Finally, in Chapter 12, we turn to children with hearing impairments, including children who use cochlear implants. These three chapters, which do not need to be read sequentially, offer some pointers in relation to therapy intervention and suggest possible directions for further research.

The book contains numerous transcribed extracts from real conversations involving children. Many of these are illustrated by recordings that can be accessed from the accompanying website, available at: www.stackhousewells.uk. These are either the original recordings or else have been recorded by actors. In all cases, the transcriptions were made from the original recordings.

As in the previous four books in the series, each chapter contains activities and keys to these activities. For some activities it is useful, though rarely essential, to be able to access the accompanying recording. The activities give the reader the opportunity to work with concepts and techniques introduced in the chapter. Undertaking the activity as a joint venture with a colleague is recommended. It is hoped that teachers of child language and speech and language therapy may also find them useful.

Notational conventions are explained in the text and listed in Appendix 1. Key terms are defined in the text. Page references for these definitions are highlighted in bold in the Index.

Pointers for the future

As in the previous books in the series, though some reference will be made to studies of children learning intonation in other languages, the focus is almost exclusively on children learning English as their first language. This reflects the authors’ own experience and the state of research more widely: there have been fewer published studies of typical and atypical intonation development in other languages. We nevertheless hope that the framework presented may be of some value for researchers and practitioners who work with other languages.

From a clinical perspective, this book focusses on issues of the nature, causes and assessment of intonation problems. We have included little explicitly about intonation as a part of speech and language therapy interventions. The main reason for this omission is that little has been published on intonation interventions for children. An important aim of this book is therefore to lay a foundation for principled intervention to take place by developing an understanding of children’s intonation development, how to assess it, and how to use this knowledge when interacting with children and their carers both informally and in teaching and therapy contexts.

Bill WellsJoy Stackhouse

Acknowledgements

Some of the research described here was supported by the Economic and Social Sciences Research Council (grant numbers R000271063, R000236696, R000222809). We thank Guy J. Brown (Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield) for preparing the figures in Chapter 1 and the simulations in Chapter 6. Many speech and language therapists, fellow researchers, former students and colleagues have contributed indirectly and directly to the genesis and production of the book, in some cases by allowing us to make use of their recordings. While it is not possible to list them all, the following merit specific mention: Julie Anstey, Jana Dankovičová, Anna Filipi, Emina Kurtić, Merle Mahon, Tom Muskett, and Jenny Thomson.

The ideas in the book have been shaped through discussion with two long-term collaborators in particular: Juliette Corrin and Sue Peppé. A special debt of gratitude is due to John Local, not only for writing the Foreword but also for developing the theory and methods that underpin our interactional approach to children’s intonation. Finally, we would like to thank the children and families whose talk is the subject matter of this book.

About the companion website

The book is accompanied by a companion website:

www.wiley.com/go/childintonation

The website contains a link to the authors’ website where you can find:

Charts from the book for downloading

Tables from the book for downloading

CHAPTER 1Intonation

Pitch, loudness and length are among the most salient of the properties of speech perceived by the listener. Linguists sometimes refer to these features as suprasegmental, suggesting that they are somehow ‘above’ the string of consonants and vowels. This connotation is misleading: rather, in speech, the string of consonants and vowels is overlaid onto a base of phonation. Phonation, or voicing, is generated by an airstream from the lungs passing through the larynx, which results in the perception of fluctuations in pitch and loudness distributed over chunks of varying durations. The term , and the related adjective , commonly refer in a broad sense to features of pitch, loudness and duration in speech, encompassing their use in individual words and their component syllables, as well as the use of these features over longer stretches of speech, i.e. phrases, complete utterances, conversational turns. These longer stretches are the main focus of this book. Over such longer stretches, the meaningful patterning of pitch, along with related patterning of loudness and length features, is commonly referred to as – hence the title of the book. While some authors restrict the use of this term to the patterning of pitch alone, we use it as a shorthand to refer to communicatively relevant systems, operating over stretches of speech consisting minimally of a single word but usually longer, which are realized primarily through features of pitch, also often of loudness and length, and sometimes of voice quality and articulation.