Role of Pitch in Toddler Looking to New and Given Referents in American English

ABSTRACT

This study examined how toddler looking to a discourse referent is mediated by the information status of the referent and the pitch contour of the referring expression. Eighteen-month-olds saw a short discourse of three sets of images with the proportion of looking time to a target analyzed during the final image. At test, the information status of the referent was either new or given and the referring expression was presented with one of three pitch contours (flat f0, monotonal (~H*), or bitonal (~L+H*)). In Experiment 1, toddlers looked reliably longer to a target referent when it was either new to the discourse or carried a non-flat pitch contour. In Experiment 2, the referring expression was removed to observe effects of information status alone on looking to a target referent. Toddlers looked significantly longer to a target when it was new versus given. More fine-grained time course analyses of eye movements revealed differences in the speed and duration of fixation to a target. Overall, the experiments show that discourse reference in toddlers is mediated by the presence of newness and pitch contours, even in the case of given information.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to the participants and their families. Thank you to Laura Kertz, Lori Rolfe, Glenda Molina-Onario, Paul Robertson, and the Metcalf Infant Research Laboratory for their help in data collection and for providing feedback on earlier versions of this paper. Thank you to the editor and anonymous reviewers whose careful comments significantly improved this manuscript and to Ron Pomper for his statistics consultations, we are very grateful. This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health under grant R01HD068501 awarded to James L. Morgan at Brown University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15475441.2022.2149400

Notes

¹ Supplemental Materials available on Figshare: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.6100680.v2.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, [R01HD068501].