15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)Barcelona, Spain |
This study investigated the abilities of adults and children to distinguish
direct reported speech from indirect reported speech in sentences read
aloud by a native English speaker. The adults were highly successful,
the older children less so and the younger children were relatively
unsuccessful. Indirect reported speech appeared to be the default
category for the children. Potential prosodic cues were identified
and measured from waveforms and pitch contours of the stimulus sentences.
Statistical analysis was applied with a view to ascertaining which
(combination of) cues best predicted the listener responses. The results
suggest that pitch movement and duration both provided important cues
to distinguishing the sentence types. The analysis also revealed a
learning effect by all groups.
Bibliographic reference. Hewlett, Nigel / Kelsey, Cherry / Lickley, Robin (2003): "Children's perception of direct and indirect reported speech", In ICPhS-15, 1313-1316.