TY  - JOUR
A1  - Chen, Aoju
A1  - Höhle, Barbara
T1  - Four- to five-year-old' use of word order and prosody in focus marking in Dutch
T2  - Linguistics Vanguard
N2  - This study investigated Dutch-speaking four- to five-year-olds’ use of word order and prosody in distinguishing focus types (broad focus, narrow focus, and contrastive narrow focus) via an interactive answer-reconstruction game. We have found an overall preference for the unmarked word order SVO and no evidence for the use of OVS to distinguish focus types. But the children used pitch and duration in the subject-nouns to distinguish focus types in SVO sentences. These findings show that Dutch-speaking four- to five-year-olds differ from their German- and Finnish-speaking peers, who show evidence of varying choice of word order to mark specific focus types, and use prosody to distinguish focus types in subject and object nouns in both SVO and OVS sentences. These comparisons suggest that typological differences in the relative importance between word order and prosody can lead to differences in children’s use of word order and prosody in unmarked and marked word orders. A more equal role of word order and prosody in the ambient language can stimulate more extensive use of prosody in the marked word order, whereas a more limited role of word order can restrict the use of prosody in the unmarked word order.
KW  - information structure
KW  - Dutch-speaking children
KW  - word order
KW  - prosody
KW  - focus
Y1  - 2018
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/53388
SN  - 2199-174X
VL  - 4
PB  - De Gruyter
CY  - Berlin
ER  -