Playing With Fire Compounds: The Tonal Accents of Compounds in (North) Norwegian Preschoolers’ Role-Play Register

Prosodic features are some of the most salient features of dialect variation in Norway. It is therefore no wonder that the switch in prosodic systems is what is first recognized by caretakers and scholars when Norwegian children code-switch to something resembling the dialect of the capital (hencefo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Language and speech 2024-03, Vol.67 (1), p.113-139
Main Author: Strand, Bror-Magnus S.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accentuation
Code switching
Corpus analysis
Fundamental frequency
Morphology
Norwegian language
Phonetics
Preschool children
Prosodic features
Regional dialects
Role playing
Spontaneous speech
Tone
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Summary:Prosodic features are some of the most salient features of dialect variation in Norway. It is therefore no wonder that the switch in prosodic systems is what is first recognized by caretakers and scholars when Norwegian children code-switch to something resembling the dialect of the capital (henceforth Urban East Norwegian, UEN) in role-play. With a focus on the system of lexical tonal accents, this paper investigates the spontaneous speech of North Norwegian children engaging in peer social role-play. By investigating F0 contours extracted from a corpus of spontaneous peer play, and comparing them with elicited baseline reference contours, this paper makes the case that children fail to apply the target tonal accent consistent with UEN in compounds in role-play, although the production of tonal accents otherwise seems to be phonetically target like UEN. Put in other words, they perform in accordance with UEN phonetics, but not UEN morpho-phonology.
ISSN:0023-8309
1756-6053
1756-6053
DOI:10.1177/00238309231161289