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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: aoju.chen@mpi.nl
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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

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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.

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