How can prosody help to learn actions?

Abstract

Unimodal investigations have dealt with motherese - but mainly with a focus on how it helps the infant to learn the phonemic system of a target language by Dominey and Dodane (2004) and how it guides infant's attention to important aspects of the speech signal. Recently, also gestural behavior revealed modifications typical for communication with a child by Iverson et al. (1999). Multi-modal studies by Gogate et al. (2000) and Zukow-Goldring (2005) point out a close relationship between speech and motion. It has been argued that it is the synchrony between multi-modal channels that links percepts to each other. Still an open question is how infants detect the correspondence between words and the structure of ongoing events. We argue that information from one modality can help to understand information from another modality, which indicates that multi-modal information is not redundant but complementary and thus necessary for learning