Using prosody to organize the signal: Sensitivities across species set the stage for prosodic bootstrapping

Abstract

Prosody is a major source of information that both adults and infants use to organize the speech signal, from segmenting words to inferring syntactic structures. Here, I will explore the extent to which the ability to take advantage of prosodic cues that we observe in humans might emerge from sensibilities already present in other species. I will review recent studies along 2 lines of research. The first one covers research into how listeners follow the principles described by the Iambic-Trochaic Law to group sounds. The second one explores how they take advantage of sonority differences and natural prosodic contours to better identify words. Together, the evidence gathered so far suggests that, similarly to humans, non-human animals use certain acoustic cues present in the signal to extract difficult-to-find regularities. More broadly, they provide support to the idea that general perceptual biases that form the bases for prosodic bootstrapping are already present in other animals. Importantly, in humans but not in other animals, such biases are combined with domain-specific representations that guide the discovery of linguistic structures.