The phonetics of sentence-initial topic and focus in adult and child Dutch

Chen, Aoju

doi:10.1075/cilt.306.05che

Cited by 70 publications

(55 citation statements)

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“…With respect to prosody, the current results mirror existing studies in showing that 4- to 5-year-olds use prosody to mark information structure, but are not yet employing it in a completely adult-like manner (e.g., Wells et al, 2004; Chen, 2007, 2009, 2011). More specifically, our participants deviated from adult speech through incomplete application of prosodic focus marking strategies.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 82%

“…However, in children's speech focus was less clearly associated with falling accents (see de Ruiter, 2014, for somewhat different results regarding givenness). Chen (2011) only found a completely adult-like use of accent type in 7- to 8-year-olds, but even at this age, focus marking in terms of duration and alignment of f 0 turning points was not yet completely adult-like (Chen, 2009). Wells et al (2004) have reported that children's ability to mark focus condition prosodically and especially their ability to correctly identify information structure in language input continues to improve between age five and age thirteen.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Acquiring Complex Focus-Marking: Finnish 4- to 5-Year-Olds Use Prosody and Word Order in Interaction

2016

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Using a language game to elicit short sentences in various information structural conditions, we found that Finnish 4- to 5-year-olds already exhibit a characteristic interaction between prosody and word order in marking information structure. Providing insights into the acquisition of this complex system of interactions, the production data showed interesting parallels to adult speakers of Finnish on the one hand and to children acquiring other languages on the other hand. Analyzing a total of 571 sentences produced by 16 children, we found that children rarely adjusted input word order, but did systematically avoid marked OVS order in contrastive object focus condition. Focus condition also significantly affected four prosodic parameters, f0, duration, pauses and voice quality. Differing slightly from effects displayed in adult Finnish speech, the children produced larger f0 ranges for words in contrastive focus and smaller ones for unfocused words, varied only the duration of object constituents to be longer in focus and shorter in unfocused condition, inserted more pauses before and after focused constituents and systematically modified their use of non-modal voice quality only in utterances with narrow focus. Crucially, these effects were modulated by word order. In contrast to comparable data from children acquiring Germanic languages, the present findings reflect the more central role of word order and of interactions between word order and prosody in marking information structure in Finnish. Thus, the study highlights the role of the target language in determining linguistic development.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 82%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acquiring Complex Focus-Marking: Finnish 4- to 5-Year-Olds Use Prosody and Word Order in Interaction

2016

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“…A semi-spontaneous approach was adopted from [5] to elicit focus marking in SVO sentences. There were five different focus conditions: narrow focus on the subject NP in sentenceinitial position: NF-i, example (1) (1) to (5), where focused constituents appear in square brackets.…”

Section: Experimental Materialsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It has also been shown that the use of pitch or duration is not related to the tonal aspects of a language [6]. For instance, both tone (e.g., Mandarin [4,7], Vietnamese [8]) and non-tone languages (e.g., English [3], Dutch [5], German [9]) use pitch range and duration for focusmarking purposes, whereas other languages only use duration to mark focus, such as Cantonese [10], Yi [11], Tsat [12], Bai [13] and Deang [11]. In addition, there are tone languages that do not use prosodic cues (pitch or duration) at all to mark focus, e.g., Yucatec Maya [14,15].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prosodic focus marking in Dali Mandarin

Liu¹,

Velde²,

Chen³

2016

5th International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages (TAL 2016)

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This study investigated prosodic marking of focus in Dali Mandarin, a variety of Xinan Guanhua (Southwestern Mandarin) spoken in Dali city, the capital of Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture, China. Dali Mandarin as a variety of Mandarin has had heavy contact with Bai, a Tibeto-Burman language, for a long time. We adopted a semi-spontaneous experimental approach to elicit SVO sentences with different focus conditions. Our data showed that native speakers of Dali Mandarin lengthened the duration of focal constituents compared to non-focal constituents for marking focus. However, they did not use duration to distinguish focus types differing in size and contrastivity. Further, pitch played no role at all in signaling focus, or in differentiating focus types. These results thus suggested that Dali Mandarin speakers use prosody by exploiting duration to mark focus. Therefore, the encoding of focus in Dali Mandarin is more similar to Bai than to Beijing Mandarin, the latter being genetically more closely related to Dali Mandarin. This result suggests that prosodic focus marking in Dali Mandarin has been influenced by Bai due to the heavy language contact.

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“…In languages that use prosody for marking focus, the prosodic cues involved differ from one language to another. For instance, some languages (such as English [1], Dutch [2,3] and Mandarin [4,5]) not only expand the pitch range and lengthen the duration of the focal constituent, but also compress the pitch range and intensity of the post-focal constituent. However, other languages only exploit duration for the same purpose (such as Cantonese [6], Tsat [7] and Bai [8]).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prosodic focus marking in Bai-Mandarin sequential bilinguals’ Mandarin

Liu¹,

Chen²,

Velde

2016

Speech Prosody 2016

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This study investigates the prosodic marking of focus in sequential bilinguals speaking Bai as their first language and Mandarin Chinese as their second language. Mandarin SVO sentences with varying information structure were elicited through a picture-matching task. The participants were primary school teachers in a Bai-speaking community. Our data shows that in their Mandarin the Bai-Mandarin sequential bilinguals lengthen the duration of the focal constituents in comparison to non-focal constituents. In addition, they expand the pitch range to distinguish focal constituents from postfocal constituents. However, focus types differing in size and contrastivity are not distinguished in duration or pitch. The present study thus provides evidence that sequential bilinguals mark focus prosodically in their L2 Mandarin, although their use of pitch as a prosodic cue for marking focus is less systematic in comparison to monolingual speakers of Mandarin.

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The phonetics of sentence-initial topic and focus in adult and child Dutch

Cited by 70 publications

References 0 publications

Acquiring Complex Focus-Marking: Finnish 4- to 5-Year-Olds Use Prosody and Word Order in Interaction

Acquiring Complex Focus-Marking: Finnish 4- to 5-Year-Olds Use Prosody and Word Order in Interaction

Prosodic focus marking in Dali Mandarin

Prosodic focus marking in Bai-Mandarin sequential bilinguals’ Mandarin

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