Prosodic focus marking in Seoul Korean-speaking children: the use of prosodic phrasing

Prosodic focus marking in Seoul Korean is known to be achieved primarily through prosodic phrasing, different from the use of prosody for this purpose in many other languages. This study investigates how children use prosodic phrasing for focus-marking purposes in Seoul Korean, compared to adults.

Using a picture-matching game, we elicited semi-spontaneous production of SOV sentences in various focus conditions from monolingual Seoul Korean-speaking children aged 4 to 11 years.

We found that the children varied prosodic boundaries to distinguish narrow focus from pre-focus and broad focus in a largely adult-like manner at the age of 4 to 5; at this age, they did not distinguish narrow focus from post-focus or contrastive focus using prosodic boundaries, similar to the adults. Their use of the prosodic boundaries in distinguishing the focus conditions was not fully adult-like in terms of frequency until the age of 10 to 11.

In conjunction with the findings of previous studies on the acquisition of focus marking in Germanic languages, performed using a similar experimental method, our findings suggest that Seoul Korean-speaking children acquire the use of prosodic phrasing earlier than Dutch-speaking children acquiring the use of pitch accent but slightly later than Stockholm Swedish-speaking children acquiring the use of a prominence-marking high tone. These findings imply that the rate of focus-marking acquisition depends on the transparency of the form-meaning mapping between the phonological cue and focus.