Différentiation des mots de fonction et des mots de contenu par la prosodie: analyse d'un corpus trilingue de langage adressé à l'enfant et à l'adulte.
Christelle Dodane, Jean-Marc Blanc, Peter Ford Dominey.

This research investigated the role of salient prosodic cues in the first approximant assignment in function and content words by infants. In order to discover these cues and to see if they could vary cross-linguistically, infantdirected speech was compared to adult-directed speech in three different languages, French, English and Japanese. The same story was successively read by 15 mothers to their infant and to an adult (5 mothers for each language). The acoustic analyses reveal that among 33 different prosodic cues, non final syllable duration, Fo peaks and amplitude peaks relevant in the three languages to allow categorization in function and content items (Fo peaks, amplitude peaks and non-final syllable duration), but they have a different relative weight across languages because of the specific prosodic organization of these languages.