The acquisition of prosodic marking of narrow focus in Central Swedish

We investigated how Central Swedish-speaking four to eleven-year-old children acquire the prosodic marking of narrow focus, compared to adult controls. Three measurements were analysed: placement of the prominence-marking high tone (prominence H), pitch range effects of the prominence H, and word du...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of child language 2022-03, Vol.49 (2), p.213-238
Main Authors: ROMØREN, Anna Sara H., CHEN, Aoju
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Adults
Child
Child, Preschool
Children
Comparative Analysis
Contrastive Linguistics
Focus
German
Germanic languages
Humans
Indo European Languages
Intonation
Language
Language Acquisition
Language Development
Linguistics
Native language acquisition
Phonetics
Phonology
Pitch
Preschool Children
Prosody
Sentence Structure
Sentences
Speech Perception
Suprasegmentals
Sweden
Swedish
Swedish language
Syllables
Task Analysis
Tone
West Germanic languages
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Summary:We investigated how Central Swedish-speaking four to eleven-year-old children acquire the prosodic marking of narrow focus, compared to adult controls. Three measurements were analysed: placement of the prominence-marking high tone (prominence H), pitch range effects of the prominence H, and word duration. Subject-verb-object sentences were elicited in sentence-medial and sentence-final focus conditions via a semi-spontaneous elicitation task. The children largely performed in an adult-like manner already at four to five: they predominantly added prominence H to focal words and avoided this tone post-focally in both sentence-medial and sentence-final position. The placement or avoidance of prominence H had largely the same effects on pitch range for children and adults. Finally, the four to eight-year-olds also increased the duration of the focal word, similar to adults. Hence, Central Swedish-speaking children master the use of prosody for focus marking at an earlier age, compared to children acquiring a West Germanic language.
ISSN:0305-0009
1469-7602
DOI:10.1017/S0305000920000847