Understanding expressive speech acts: the role of prosody and situational context in French-speaking 5- to 9-year-olds.

PURPOSE This study was aimed at determining the role of prosody and situational context in children's understanding of expressive utterances. Which one of these 2 cues will help children grasp the speaker's intention? Do children exhibit a "contextual bias" whereby they ignore prosody, such as the "lexical bias" found in other studies (M. Friend & J. Bryant, 2000)? METHOD In the first experiment, a group of 5- to 9-year-old children and a group of adults performed a computerized judgment task. They had to determine the speaker's intention on the basis of an utterance produced with a particular prosody (positive or negative) in a particular situational context (positive or negative). In the second experiment, the same prosodic utterances were presented to 5- to 9-year-old children without a situational context. RESULTS The 5- and 7-year-old children relied primarily on situational context, in contrast to adults, who relied on prosody. The 9-year-olds relied on both cues (Experiment 1). When prosody was the sole cue (Experiment 2), all children relied on this cue to infer the speaker's intention. CONCLUSIONS The results are discussed and integrated into a larger conceptual framework that includes research on lexical bias and sarcasm.