Children's Intonation: A Framework for Practice and Research

Children’s Intonation is a practical guide that focuses on the nature, causes and assessment of intonation problems for children and adolescents. Highlighting the importance of intonation for everyday conversational interaction and the implications of this for teaching and therapy contexts, this book addresses the following questions: How and when do children learn to use intonation for the purposes of interaction?  As children get older, does intonation become more important or less important for communication? How might intonation be used to support or compensate for other aspects of language? What are the implications for practitioners, parents and caregivers when interacting with young children? Clinically oriented, this book explores these questions through case studies that cover a range of developmental communication difficulties including autism spectrum disorders, hearing impairment and specific speech and language difficulties.   It provides readers with a tool for profiling children’s intonation skills, a developmental phase model to explain typical and atypical intonation development, a psycholinguistic model of intonation processing, interactional perspectives on intonation use, and consideration of intonation in relation to both written and spoken language. It also includes acccess to a companion website with extra resources.

Table of Contents:
Foreword vi Preface viii Acknowledgements xi About the companion website xii 1 Intonation 1 2 Turns 17 3 Focus 40 4 Actions 68 5 The Intonation In Interaction Profile (IIP) 92 6 Infancy 113 7 Preschool years 139 8 School years 168 9 Models 199 10 Speech, language and literacy impairments 214 11 Autism spectrum disorders and learning difficulties 249 12 Hearing impairment and cochlear implants 276 References 301 Appendix 1 Transcription conventions and symbols 311 Appendix 2 Background to the recordings of Robin and his mother 314 Appendix 3 The Intonation In Interaction Profile (IIP): Proforma 315 Appendix 4 The Developmental Phase Model 319 Appendix 5 The Intonation Processing Model 324 Appendix 6 The Intonation In Interaction Profile: Mick 325 Appendix 7 The Intonation In Interaction Profile: Jacob 329 Appendix 8 Phonetic transcript: Ricky 333 Index 343

About the Author :
Bill Wells and Joy Stackhouse are both Professors within the Department of Human Communication Sciences at the University of Sheffield, UK

Review :
"Each chapter is clearly structured, and provides transcribed excerpts from parent-child or child-child talk (often illuminated by recorded data on the authors' website), which are then analysed and profiled; enabling the reader to identify the nature of potential intonation difficulties, and to interpret these as a starting point for planning possible intervention. I recommend this book as a valuable resource." (RCSLT Bulletin 2016)