gestures and prosody

[Judy Vander Woude]

Jeff,

You may wish to look at the Tarplee's chapter in the following book:

Tarplee, C. (1996). Working on young children's utterances: prosodic
aspects of repetition during picture labeling. In Couper-Kuhlen, E. &
Selting, M. (Eds.) Prosody in conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.

Clare doesn't address prosody before syntax, but she does wonderfully
illustrate how important prosody is in parent-child conversation.  The rest
of the volume addresses the role of prosody in both adult and child
conversations.

Judy.




>
>Thank you Brian for your comments.  I have heard that articles/papers
>have discussed the concept of prosody being acquired before syntax.
>What I am interested in specifically is that prosody is a very
>important factor in communication.  In some instances of adult
>communication, the only way to distinguish between a declarative,
>and a question is from prosodic structure when the phonemic string
>is the same.  In the case of children, especially children who I have
>not spent much time with, I sometimes cannot make out the individual
>lexical items, but the prosodic nature of the utterance is the glue that
>allows me to understand what they are trying to communicate. If there
>are articles in favor or against this concept, I would be more than
>willing to receive more info along these lines.
>

>Jeff
>
>
>
>=================================================
>Jeff ALLEN - Directeur Technique
>European Language Resources Association (ELRA)  &
>European Language resources Distribution Agency (ELDA)
>(Agence Européenne de Distribution des Ressources Linguistiques)
>55, rue Brillat-Savarin
>75013   Paris   FRANCE
>Tel: (+33) (0) 1.43.13.33.33 - Fax: (+33) (0) 1.43.13.33.30
>mailto:jeff at elda.fr
>http://www.icp.grenet.fr/ELRA/home.html


Judith Vander Woude, Ph.D.
Department of Communication Arts and Sciences
Calvin College
3201 Burton SE
Grand Rapids, MI 49546