Learning to use word versus phrase level prosody to identify compounds from lists is thought to be a protracted process, only acquired by 11 years (Vogel & Raimy, 2002). However, a recent study has shown that 5-year-olds can use prosodic cues other than stress for these two structures in production, at least for early-acquired noun-noun compounds (Yuen et al., 2021). This raises the question of whether children this age can also use naturally-produced prosody to identify noun-noun compounds from their list forms in comprehension. The results show that 5-6-year-olds (N = 28) can only identify compounds. Unlike adults, children as a group could not use boundary cues to identify lists and were significantly slower in their processing compared to adults. This suggests that the acquisition of word level prosody may precede the acquisition of phrase level prosody, i.e., some higher-level aspects of phrasal prosody may take longer to acquire.

学习使用单词与短语级别的韵律来识别列表中的化合物被认为是一个漫长的过程，直到 11 年才获得（Vogel & Raimy，2002）。然而，最近的一项研究表明，5 岁的孩子可以在生产中对这两种结构使用除压力之外的韵律线索，至少对于早期获得的名词-名词复合词来说是这样（Yuen 等人，2021 年）。这就提出了一个问题，这个年龄段的孩子是否也可以使用自然产生的韵律来识别名词-名词复合词从它们的列表形式中理解。结果表明，5-6 岁的儿童（N = 28）只能识别化合物。与成人不同，儿童作为一个群体不能使用边界线索来识别列表，并且与成人相比，他们的处理速度要慢得多。这表明词级韵律的习得可能先于短语韵律的习得，即短语韵律的某些更高层次的方面可能需要更长的时间才能习得。