TY  - JOUR
A1  - Szendroi, Kriszta
A1  - Bernard, Carline
A1  - Berger, Frauke
A1  - Gervain, Judit
A1  - Höhle, Barbara
T1  - Acquisition of prosodic focus marking by English, French, and German three-, four-, five- and six-year-olds
T2  - Journal of child language
N2  - 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.
Y1  - 2017
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/54711
SN  - 0305-0009
SN  - 1469-7602
VL  - 45
IS  - 1
SP  - 219
EP  - 241
PB  - Cambridge Univ. Press
CY  - New York
ER  -