Chapter 14. Children’s development of internal state prosody

Abstract

Infants have access to the prosodic aspects of their ambient language even prior to birth, but many aspects of prosody are produced and comprehended well after infancy. One of these aspects includes prosody related to internal states such as beliefs, desires, feelings and emotions. In this chapter, we review the literature on prosody related to internal states, paying special attention to prosodic meanings associated with emotions and belief states and drawing from production and comprehension studies of preschool- and school-aged children. We show that there are many parallels in the development of these two aspects of prosody, suggesting the usefulness of studying them in tandem. Implications for these findings are discussed as well as fruitful directions for future work.