Acquisition of belief state intonation

How are children able to convey and perceive belief states through intonation? I am currently examining children’s comprehension of intonationally-encoded belief states in American English-speaking children here in Western Massachusetts. In a battery of tasks I am exploring how children perceive belief and disbelief in questions, as well as how this relates to their general ability to infer belief states as well as their ability to do pitch discrimination.

Production of intonationally-encoded “layered meaning” 

I was awarded a Faculty Research Grant/Healey Endowment Grant to carry out research examining intonation used by mothers and children from different speech communities in urban centers in Western Mass (e.g. Springfield & Holyoke). This will be explored in both Spanish and English, looking specifically at how mothers and children convey information through intonation that goes beyond the simple speech act.

Uptalk

I am currently collaborating with researchers at the University of California San Diego on a project comparing how college students from Massachusetts and California use rising intonation on utterances that are not questions. I am interested in these types of strategies in other languages as well.

L2 

I have been working with Covadonga Sánchez Alvarado on a project examining how L2 speakers of Spanish with L1 American English use prosody to convey contrastive (corrective) focus in their L2.