Data from: Utterance-final position and pitch marking aid word learning in school-age children

We investigated the effects of word order and prosody on word learning in
school-age children. Third graders viewed photographs belonging to one of
three semantic categories while hearing four-word nonsense utterances
containing a target word. In the control condition, all words had the same
pitch and, across trials, the position of the target word was varied
systematically within each utterance. The only cue to word–meaning mapping
was the co-occurrence of target words and referents. This cue was present
in all conditions. In the Utterance-final condition, the target word
always occurred in utterance-final position, and at the same fundamental
frequency as all the other words of the utterance. In the Pitch peak
condition, the position of the target word was varied systematically
within each utterance across trials, and produced with pitch contrasts
typical of infant-directed speech (IDS). In the Pitch
peak + Utterance-final condition, the target word always occurred in
utterance-final position, and was marked with a pitch contrast typical of
IDS. Word learning occurred in all conditions except the control
condition. Moreover, learning performance was significantly higher than
that observed with simple co-occurrence (control condition) only for the
Pitch peak + Utterance-final condition. We conclude that, for school-age
children, the combination of words' utterance-final alignment and
pitch enhancement boosts word learning.