Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T04:15:41.830Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Tuning information packaging: intonational realization of topic and focus in child Dutch*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 March 2011

AOJU CHEN
AOJU CHEN*
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
*
Address for correspondence: Aoju Chen, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, P.O. Box 310, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands. e-mail: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This study examined how four- to five-year-olds and seven- to eight-year-olds used intonation (accent placement and accent type) to encode topic and focus in Dutch. Naturally spoken declarative sentences with either sentence-initial topic and sentence-final focus or sentence-initial focus and sentence-final topic were elicited via a picture-matching game. Results showed that the four- to five-year-olds were adult-like in topic-marking, but were not yet fully adult-like in focus-marking, in particular, in the use of accent type in sentence-final focus (i.e. showing no preference for H*L). Between age five and seven, the use of accent type was further developed. In contrast to the four- to five-year-olds, the seven- to eight-year-olds showed a preference for H*L in sentence-final focus. Furthermore, they used accent type to distinguish sentence-initial focus from sentence-initial topic in addition to phonetic cues.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 38 , Issue 5 , November 2011 , pp. 1055 - 1083
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

[*]

I greatly acknowledge the cooperation of the children, their parents and the teaching staff from Adalbert Primary School in Mook and De Achtsprong Primary School in Beuningen. I also would like to thank Christine Dimroth, Wolfgang Klein and Bhuvana Narasimhan for useful feedback in the course of this study; Carlos Gussenhoven for advice on intonation transcription; Marieke Hoetjes and Alice Kruisselbrink for assistance in testing the children and annotating the data; and Rik van den Brule and Steven Rekké for automating the data-processing procedure. I am also grateful to Marieke Hoetjes for serving as the second ToDI-transcriber. Preliminary results concerning the four- to five-year-old children and the adults were presented at the 16th International Congress on Phonetic Sciences in Saarbrücken, Germany, 6–10 August, 2007.

References

REFERENCES

Allen, S. E. M., Skarabela, B. & Hughes, M. (2008). Using corpora to examine discourse effects in syntax. In Behrens, H. (ed.), Corpora in language acquisition research: Finding structure in data. Amsterdam: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Arnold, J. E. (2008). Reference production: Production-internal and addressee-oriented processes. Language and Cognitive Processes 23(4), 495–527.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Behrens, H. & Gut, U. (2005). The relationship between prosodic and syntactic organization in early multiword speech. Journal of Child Language 32, 1–34.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Boersma, P. (1993). Accurate short-term analysis of the fundamental frequency and the harmonics-to-noise ratio of a sampled sound. In Proceedings of the Institute of Phonetic Sciences, Amsterdam.Google Scholar
Boersma, P. (2001). Praat, a system for doing phonetics by computer. Glot International 5(9/10), 341–45.Google Scholar
Chafe, W. C. (1976). Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view. In Li, C. (ed.), Subject and Topic. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Chen, A. (2007). Intonational realisation of topic and focus by Dutch-acquiring 4- to 5-year-olds. In Trouvain, J. & William, J. B. (eds), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Pirrot GmbH: Dudweiler.Google Scholar
Chen, A. (2009). The phonetics of sentence-initial topic and focus in adult and child Dutch. In Vigário, M., Frota, S. & Freitas, M. J. (eds), Phonetics and phonology: Interactions and interrelations. Amsterdam: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Chen, A. & Fikkert, P. (2007). Intonation of early two-word utterances in Dutch. In Trouvain, J. & William, J. B. (eds), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Pirrot GmbH: Dudweiler.Google Scholar
Clark, H. H. & Haviland, S. E. (1977). Comprehension and the given-new contact. In Freedle, R. O. (ed.), Discourse production and comprehension. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Cutler, A. & Swinney, D. A. (1987). Prosody and the development of comprehension. Journal of Child Language 14, 145–67.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
De Cat, C. (2008). Experimental evidence for preschoolers' mastery of ‘topic’. In Gavarró, A. & Freitas, M. J. (eds), Proceedings of GALA 2007. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Google Scholar
De Ruiter, L. E. (2009). The prosodic marking of topical referents in the German ‘Vorfeld’ by children and adults. The Linguistic Review 26(2/3), 329–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
D'Odorico, L. & Carubbi, S. (2003). Prosodic characteristics of early multi-word utterances in Italian children. First Language 23(1), 97–116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flax, J., Lahey, M., Harris, K. & Boothroyd, A. (1991). Relations between prosodic variables and communicative functions. Journal of Child Language 18, 3–19.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Garrod, S. & Pickering, M. J. (2004). Why is conversation so easy? Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8, 8–11.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gundel, J. K. (1988). Universals of topic–comment structure. In Hammond, M., Moravcsik, E. & Wirth, J. R. (eds), Studies in syntactic typology. Amsterdam: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Gussenhoven, C. (1983). Testing the reality of focus domains. Language and Speech 26, 61–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gussenhoven, C. (2004). The phonology of tone and intonation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gussenhoven, C. (2005). Transcription of Dutch intonation. In Jun, S. (ed.), Prosodic typology and transcription: A unified approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Gussenhoven, C., Rietveld, R., Kerkhoff, J. & Terken, J. (2003). Transcription of Dutch intonation: Courseware, 2nd edn, at http://todi.let.kun.nl/ToDI/home.htm.Google Scholar
Horne, M. (1990). Accentual patterning in ‘new’ vs. ‘given’ subjects in English. Lund Working Papers in Linguistics 36, 81–97.Google Scholar
Hornby, P. A. & Hass, W. A. (1970). Use of contrastive stress by preschool children. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 13, 359–99.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jackendoff, R. (1972). Semantic interpretation in generative grammar. Cambridge, MA: MPI Press.Google Scholar
Ladd, D. R. (1996). Intonational phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lahey, M. (1974). Use of prosody and syntactic markers in children's comprehension of spoken sentences. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 17, 656–68.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lambrecht, K. (1994). Information structure and sentence form: Topics, focus, and the representations of discourse referents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
MacWhinney, B. & Bates, E. (1978). Sentential devices for conveying givenness and newness: A cross-cultural developmental study. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 17, 539–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maratsos, M. (1974). Preschool children's use of definite and indefinite articles. Child Development 45, 446–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McDaniel, D. & Maxfield, T. L. (1992). Principle B and contrastive stress. Language Acquisition 2(4), 337–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Müller, A., Höhle, B., Schmitz, M. & Weissenborn, J. (2006). Focus-to-stress alignment in 4- to 5-year-old German-learning children. In Belletti, A., Bennati, E., Chesi, C., Di Domenico, E. & Ferrari, I. (eds), Proceedings of GALA 2005. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press.Google Scholar
O'Neill, D. K. (1996). Two-year-old children's sensitivity to a parent's knowledge stage when making requests. Child Development 67(2), 659–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oostdijk, N. H. J. (2000). The Spoken Dutch Corpus: Outline and first evaluation. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation.Google Scholar
Patel, R. & Grigos, M. I. (2006). Acoustic characterization of the question–statement contrast in 4-, 7- and 11-year-old children. Speech Communication 48, 1308–318.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prieto, P. & Vanrell, M. M. (2007). Early intonational development in Catalan. In Trouvain, J. & William, J. B. (eds), Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Pirrot GmbH: Dudweiler.Google Scholar
Prince, E. F. (1986). On the syntactic marking of presupposed open propositions. In Farley, A., Farley, P. & McCullough, K. E. (eds), Papers from the Parasession on Pragmatics and Grammatical Theory, 22nd Regional Meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society.Google Scholar
Reinhart, T. (1982). Pragmatics and linguistics: An analysis of sentence topics. Philosophica 27, 53–94.Google Scholar
Scollon, R. (1979). A real early stage: An unzippered condensation of a dissertation on child language. In Ochs, E. & Schieffelin, E. (eds), Developmental pragmatics. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Selkirk, E. O. (1995). Sentence prosody: Intonation, stress and phrasing. In Goldsmith, J. (ed.), Handbook of phonological theory. London: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Solan, L. (1980). Contrastive stress and children's interpretation of pronouns. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 23, 688–98.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Steedman, M. (2000). Information structure and the syntax–phonology interface. Linguistic Inquiry 31(4), 649–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vallduví, E. (1992). The informational component. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
Vallduví, E. & Engdahl, E. (1996). The linguistic realisation of information packaging. Linguistics 34, 459–519.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wang, B. & Xu, Y. (2006). Prosodic encoding of Topic and Focus in Mandarin. In Hoffmann, R. & Mixdorff, H. (eds), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2006. Dresden: TUD Press.Google Scholar
Wells, B. & Local, J. (1993). The sense of an ending: A case of prosodic delay. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics 7(1), 59–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wells, B., Peppé, S. & Goulandris, N. (2004). Intonation development from five to thirteen. Journal of Child Language 31, 749–78.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wieman, L. A. (1976). Stress patterns in early child language. Journal of Child Language 3, 283–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar