There is considerable debate about whether early vocalizations mimic the target language and whether prosody signals emergent intentional communication. A longitudinal corpus of four Catalan-babbling infants was analyzed to investigate whether children use different prosodic patterns to distinguish communicative from investigative vocalizations and to express intentionality. A total of 2,701 vocalizations from 0;7 to 0;11 were coded acoustically (by marking pitch range and duration), gesturally, and pragmatically (by marking communicative status and specific pragmatic function). The results showed that communicative vocalizations were shorter and had a wider pitch range than investigative vocalizations and that these patterns in communicative vocalizations depended on the intention of the vocalizations: requests and expressions of discontent displayed wider pitch range and longer duration than responses or statements. These results support the hypothesis that babbling children can successfully use a set of prosodic patterns to signal intentional speech.

This research has been funded by the following 5 grants: two research grants awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, ‘The role of tonal scaling and tonal alignment in distinguishing intonational categories in Catalan and Spanish’ (FFI2009-07648/FILO), and ‘Gestures, prosody and linguistic structure’ (FFI2012-31995); a grant awarded by the Generalitat de Catalunya to the Grup d'Estudis de Prosòdia (2009SGR-701); the grant RECERCAIXA 2012 for the project ‘Els precursors del llenguatge. Una guia TIC per a pares i educadors’ awarded by Obra Social ‘La Caixa’ and the grant Consolider-Ingenio 2010 (CSD2007-00012).