INTONATIONAL REALISATION OF TOPIC AND FOCUS BY DUTCH-ACQUIRING 4- TO 5-YEAR-OLDS

Aoju Chen
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

ID 1647
[full paper]

This study examined how Dutch-acquiring 4- to 5-year-olds use pitch accent types and deaccentuation to mark topic and focus at the sentence level and how they differ from adults. The topic and focus were non-contrastive and realized as full NPs. A picture-matching game was designed to elicit topic-focus structures. It was found that children realise topic and focus similarly frequently with H*L, whereas adults use H*L more frequently in focus than in topic in sentence-initial position and nearly only in focus in sentence-final position. Further, children frequently realise topic with accentuation, whereas adults mostly deaccent sentence-final topic and use H*L and H* to realise sentence-initial topic because of rhythmic motivation. These results show that 4- and 5-year-olds have not acquired H*L as the typical focus accent and deaccentuation as the typical topic intonation.