Speaker
Description
This study investigates how children’s speech is affected by language-specific characteristics, how these characteristics differ between children who speak one or more languages, and how these characteristics are related to the reparation of misunderstandings. Further, we focus on how children use fundamental frequency and interjections in speech as tools to repair misunderstandings. Variability in children’s communicative environments, such as the interaction partners and spoken languages, significantly shapes their communicative behaviour. Bilingualism in children, which inherently increases this variability, is associated with greater use of non-verbal means for communication, greater flexibility in using different means to communicate, a stronger ability to adapt their speech to listeners, and a greater likelihood of repairing communication breakdowns.
While previous research explored these adaptive behaviours in bilingual children, the specific roles of speech elements like fundamental frequency (perceived pitch) and interjections (e.g., “Aha!” and “Oh!”) - which serve to express emotions, arousal, and attract attention - remain underexplored. To address this gap, this study will examine language-specific differences in fundamental frequency among monolingual and bilingual children in natural non-interactive speech during a picture-description task. Further, the study is focusing on how children adapt their speech following misunderstandings, during natural interaction with the experimenter in in which children describe the location of known and novel objects on a shelf. .
This poster outlines the research design and methodology, detailing how data will be collected and analysed to investigate these questions. The findings will offer insights into the role of speech in communicative development, particularly in how children repair communication breakdowns.
