Acquisition of prosodic focus marking by English, French, and German three-, four-, five- and six-year-olds

Abstract

Previous research on young children's knowledge of prosodic focus marking has revealed an apparent paradox, with comprehension appearing to lag behind production. Comprehension of prosodic focus is difficult to study experimentally due to its subtle and ambiguous contribution to pragmatic meaning. We designed a novel comprehension task, which revealed that three- to six-year-old children show adult-like comprehension of the prosodic marking of subject and object focus. Our findings thus support the view that production does not precede comprehension in the acquisition of focus. We tested participants speaking English, German, and French. All three languages allow prosodic subject and object focus marking, but use additional syntactic marking to varying degrees (English: dispreferred; German: possible; French preferred). French participants produced fewer subject marked responses than English participants. We found no other cross-linguistic differences. Participants interpreted prosodic focus marking similarly and in an adult-like fashion in all three languages.

Understanding Prosodic Focus Marking in Mandarin Chinese: Data from Children and Adults

“…The paradoxical findings have not been replicated in studies of children acquiring other languages; however, recent research with French-, German-and English-speaking children, reported by Szendrői et al (2017) has challenged the conclusion that production precedes comprehension in the acquisition of prosodic focus. The Szendrői et al (2017) study found that children as young as 3-years-old were sensitive to prosodic salience as a means for determining the identity of a focused subject phrase.…”

“…Although comprehension generally precedes production in the acquisition of cognitive skills, English-speaking children appear to use prosodic cues in sentence production much earlier than they exploit these cues in sentence comprehension (e.g., Hornby, 1971;Wells et al, 2004). The paradoxical findings have not been replicated in studies of children acquiring other languages; however, recent research with French-, German-and English-speaking children, reported by Szendrői et al (2017) has challenged the conclusion that production precedes comprehension in the acquisition of prosodic focus. The Szendrői et al (2017) study found that children as young as 3-years-old were sensitive to prosodic salience as a means for determining the identity of a focused subject phrase.…”

The Multimodal Perception of Contrastive Focus in French: A Developmental Study

“…Regardless of their age, participants had a harder time understanding prosody in the 4 One might suggest that longer reaction times in children reflect the difficulty of the task. However, a similar task was used by Szendröi et al (2018) with 3-to 6year-old children (younger than the child participants in this study), and proved to be appropriate for this population. visual modality than in the audio modality.…”

“…The experimenter would start the experiment only when the child acknowledged that she/he understood the task and was ready to perform it. This kind of task was also used with preschool-aged children in Szendröi et al (2018) study and proved to be reliable. Each child was supervised by an experimenter, who made sure the child remained focused on the task.…”

“…A recent study investigating focus marking in English-, French-, and German-speaking children confirmed this hypothesis. It is important to note that the abovementioned studies did not include any experiment testing the phonetic implementation of focus (Szendröi et al, 2018). Even though children can produce and perceive focused words, do they manipulate the same cues in the speech signal as adults do?…”