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

Abstract

This study investigated whether Mandarin speakers interpret prosodic information as focus markers in a sentence-picture verification task. Previous production studies have shown that both Mandarin-speaking adults and Mandarin-speaking children mark focus by prosodic information (Ouyang and Kaiser in Lang Cogn Neurosc 30(1-2):57-72, 2014; Yang and Chen in Prosodic focus marking in Chinese four-and eight-year-olds, 2014). However, while prosodic focus marking did not seem to affect sentence comprehension in adults Mandarin-speaking children showed enhanced sentence comprehension when the sentence focus was marked by prosodic information in a previous study (Chen in Appl Psycholinguist 19(4):553-582, 1998). The present study revisited this difference between Mandarin speaking adults and children by applying a newly designed task that tested the use of prosodic information to identify the sentence focus. No evidence was obtained that Mandarin-speaking children (as young as 3 years of age) adhered more strongly to prosodic information than adults but that word order was the strongest cue for their focus interpretation. Our findings support the view that children attune to the specific means of information structure marking in their ambient language at an early age.

Children's comprehension of prosodically marked focus in Hungarian: How mandatory syntactic focus-marking affects the trajectory of acquisition

“…It is potentially illuminating to compare our results with Chen et al's (2019), who, using the same task as Szendrői et al (2018), found even lower rates of congruent corrections by Mandarin children in the subject-focus condition (cca. 15%) than we did.…”

“…As our predictions concerned the rates of focus-congruent corrections of false stimulus sentences, our primary statistical analysis was based on the distribution of those responses that corrected the particular constituent in the incorrect statement that was prosodically marked as the focus (the same choice is made by Chen et al ., 2019, who employed the same experimental task). Accordingly, responses were encoded as binary data based on whether they were congruent or non-congruent (the latter including incongruent corrections, as well as non-corrective responses).…”

“…In Chen's (1998) study children responded to subject-focus sentences congruently roughly 65% of the time at age five. By contrast, in a recent experiment relying on a very similar method, Chen, Szendrői, Crain and Höhle (2019) found that three- to five-year-olds corrected subject-focus sentences in a congruent manner only cca. 15% of the time, significantly less systematically than adults.…”

“…The reason for the discrepancy between the results of the two studies remains unclear (cf. Chen et al ., 2019, p. 29).…”

“…A much less appreciated further source of variation is the fact that some of the different empirical studies have investigated different languages. Although it has been explicitly viewed as an important factor in the study of the development of focus production (see Chen, 2018 for a recent overview), cross-linguistic variation in the system of focus-marking has not been methodically investigated in the domain of focus comprehension (for two notable exceptions, see Szendrői et al ., 2018, and Chen et al ., 2019). The present paper seeks to address this paucity.…”