Excellence in communication skills requires an ability to
appropriately represent the discourse structure including focus, as
well as good comprehension of speaker affect. Both focus and affect
are communicated in large part through prosody, so comprehension and
production of the accompanying prosody is essential. However, past
studies on focus prosody have been both theoretically and
methodologically separated from the research on affect prosody. (In
this chapter, I use the term ‘focus prosody’ to refer to prosodic
phenomena that are either produced or perceived as the cue to a
specific part of speech that conveys the focal content of a message.
This includes ‘narrow focus’, which is defined in terms of the
informational scope (e.g., answers to Wh-questions), and
‘contrastive focus’, which is a subtype of narrow focus that evokes
interpretational alternatives.) This chapter argues that the
suggested difference in the developmental trajectory (i.e., focus
prosody develops slower as compared to affect prosody) may be an
artifact of the perspective divergence, and points out that the
mastery of prosodic skills in both these domains must be necessarily
gradual – though they may not develop
hand-in-hand. A holistic approach that considers the interaction
between affect prosody and focus prosody is proposed as a future
direction of the research on prosodic development within and across
individuals.
Article outline
Introduction
Theoretical division: Fundamental affect function vs. complex
information-structuring function of prosody?
Methodological division: Passive tasks to test affect detection
vs. interactive tasks to test focus comprehension
Slow development of prosodic skills and slow development of
developmental theory: Why does it take so long?
Interaction and integration of affect prosody and focus
prosody
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