Margaret Kehoe
Faculté de Psychologie et des Sciences de l’éducation, Université de Genève, Genève, Switzerland

Series: Languages and Linguistics
BISAC: LAN018000

This book is a comprehensive yet succinct overview of research on prosodic development, uniting phonetic, phonological and clinical approaches to the topic. It brings together diverse research findings on prosodic perception, prosodic production, the development of prosodic structure and prosodic disorders in clinical populations. The book is written for advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, as well as for professionals and scholars working in linguistics, child language development, psychology or related disciplines.
The first part of the book deals with phonetic approaches. Following a detailed introduction in which the formal and functional aspects of prosody are defined, the book describes stimulating new research findings on the perception of prosody with neonates and infants.

At the same time, it introduces the reader to important related themes in speech perception research such as prosodic bootstrapping and word segmentation. Included in this first part is a discussion of the production of prosody during the pre-linguistic and early linguistic periods, with a focus on central topics such as ambient language effects and differentiation of prosody according to pragmatic function. The final component in this part is the discussion of the development of individual prosodic systems such as stress, timing, intonation and tone.
The second part of the book deals with phonological approaches to prosodic development. It reviews the vast literature base that has accrued during recent years on the development of prosodic structure within the framework of prosodic phonology.

The importance of prosodic units (the mora, syllable, foot, prosodic word and phonological phrase) in accounting for children’s phonological patterns is addressed. The third and final part of the book deals with clinical aspects of prosody such as the assessment of prosody and atypical prosody in clinical conditions such as autistic spectrum disorder, childhood apraxia of speech, specific language impairment and hearing impairment. The book’s cross-linguistic approach is documented through numerous examples and illustrations. Chapter summaries, relevant sidebar topics and a list of key terms make the book highly readable and accessible. (Imprint: Nova)