ABSTRACT
The chapter reports on a pilot study on receptive prosody skills of Polish children and young adults vis-à-vis their non-linguistic auditory abilities, language processing skills, and non-verbal IQ. A battery of prosodic tests (phrasal boundary interpretation, question vs. statement distinction, happy vs. sad voice distinction), an auditory test on high frequency sound sweeps distinction (range 1500-2500 Hz), a sentence repetition test, and a non-word repetition test were given to 86 children (age range 3;6-10;9) and 26 adults (age range 20-30). The results show a complex pattern of acquisition of the separate aspects of prosody and a strong correlation between the children’s prosodic skills and their ability to analyse high frequency sound sweeps of 250 ms. length. There were weak and moderate correlations between non-word and sentence repetition tasks and some prosody tasks, and no correlations between non-verbal IQ and any of the tasks.
