Non-Spanish-Speaking Adults Can Detect Meaning through Prosody in Spanish-Speaking Mothers' Toy-Play Utterances

Mothers' speech to infants during toy play contains three primary categories of utterances (attention-getting, action description, and celebration), and these categories can be detected by adults using prosody alone.  Here, non-Spanish-speakers were as good as Spanish speakers at detecting utterance type from prosody in clips from Spanish-speaking parent-infant interactions.