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AbstractPrevious evidence suggests that children's mastery of prosodic modulations to signal the informational status of discourse referents emerges quite late in development. In the present study, we investigate the children's use of head gestures as it compares to prosodic cues to signal a referent as being contrastive relative to a set of possible alternatives. A group of French‐speaking pre‐schoolers were audio‐visually recorded while playing in a semi‐spontaneous but controlled production task, to elicit target words in the context of broad focus, contrastive focus, or corrective focus utterances. We analysed the acoustic features of the target words (syllable duration and word‐level pitch range), as well as the head gesture features accompanying these target words (head gesture type, alignment patterns with speech). We found that children's production of head gestures, but not their use of either syllable duration or word‐level pitch range, was affected by focus condition. Children mostly aligned head gestures with relevant speech units, especially when the target word was in phrase‐final position. Moreover, the presence of a head gesture was linked to greater syllable duration patterns in all focus conditions. Our results show that (a) 4‐ and 5‐year‐old French‐speaking children use head gestures rather than prosodic cues to mark the informational status of discourse referents, (b) the use of head gestures may gradually entrain the production of adult‐like prosodic features, and that (c) head gestures with no referential relation with speech may serve a linguistic structuring function in communication, at least during language development.

AbstractThe influence of motor knowledge on speech perception is well established, but the functional role of the motor system is still poorly understood. The present study explores the hypothesis that speech production abilities may help infants discover phonetic categories in the speech stream, in spite of coarticulation effects. To this aim, we examined the influence of babbling abilities on consonant categorization in 6‐ and 9‐month‐old infants. Using an intersensory matching procedure, we investigated the infants' capacity to associate auditory information about a consonant in various vowel contexts with visual information about the same consonant, and to map auditory and visual information onto a common phoneme representation. Moreover, a parental questionnaire evaluated the infants' consonantal repertoire. In a first experiment using /b/–/d/ consonants, we found that infants who displayed babbling abilities and produced the /b/ and/or the /d/ consonants in repetitive sequences were able to correctly perform intersensory matching, while non‐babblers were not. In a second experiment using the /v/–/z/ pair, which is as visually contrasted as the /b/–/d/ pair but which is usually not produced at the tested ages, no significant matching was observed, for any group of infants, babbling or not. These results demonstrate, for the first time, that the emergence of babbling could play a role in the extraction of vowel‐independent representations for consonant place of articulation. They have important implications for speech perception theories, as they highlight the role of sensorimotor interactions in the development of phoneme representations during the first year of life.