Chapter published in:
The Development of Prosody in First Language Acquisition
Edited by Pilar Prieto and Núria Esteve-Gibert
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 23] 2018
► pp. 295–314

Chapter 15
Get the focus right across languages

Acquisition of prosodic focus-marking in production

| Utrecht University

Languages differ in both the use of prosody in focus marking and prosodic systems. In the light of recent studies of acquisition of prosodic focus marking in typologically different languages, we argue that typological differences have direct influences on acquisition of prosodic focus marking. More specifically, differences in reliance on phonetic uses of prosody and transparency of how prosody is used phonologically to encode focus can lead to cross-linguistic differences in rate of acquisition. Differences in whether the prosodic means involved are also used for lexical purposes and in interface between prosody and word order can trigger cross-linguistic differences in route of acquisition.

Article outline
  • Introduction
  • An overview of methods
    • The picture/video-description task
    • The picture-matching game
    • The answer-reconstruction game
  • Acquisition of prosodic focus marking across languages
    • Effects of reliance on phonetic uses of prosody
    • Effects of transparency in phonological uses of prosody
    • Effects of lexical use of pitch
    • Effects of relative importance of prosody and word order in focus marking
  • Conclusions
  • Future research
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 24 May 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.23.15che
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