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.

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